Content With Nothing Poem by Gary Diamond

I don't know how it is, or why it is, but it's certainly there.
I've seen perfectly normal, somewhat intelligent people
Suddenly lose all track of time and all sense of place
And it seems to affect most of the human race,
this,
Curious affliction.

People walk into their air-conditioned, overlit shopping malls.
People walk in as if to a heavenly haven, oblivious of each other.
They window shop until they find something.
And when they find that special thing, the world must melt.
And all it is then is them, the thing and the glass window.

They walk towards it as if in a trance.
They walk towards it into the path of young mothers
Into the way of old codgers
Annoying the pace of a passing, baseball cap teenager.
Yes,
Yes,
It's a curious affliction.

There is a phrase I like to use.
It's only two words, but they're good ones.
I call it 'spatial awareness'.
All of us have this in varying degrees.
When people slip into this trance they seem to
Lose it completely.
It's very strange.

I can't say it's ever happened to me.
Even in an aisle surrounded by my two favourite things
I can still perceive everything else around me.
But it happens to some people.

This is the drug.
This is the consumerist plague.
It's why credit cards exist.
It's why the economy heads endlessly back and forth to recession.
All it seems to take is a bright sign, a radio commercial.
And it ignites people's trances.


Content With Nothing

I've met enough people.
Yes, sometimes I think too many.
Most of them left no impression at all.
I don't hate them, they just blended in to the background noise that is human life.

It was easy to trace out patterns.
It was easy to get bored of them quickly, and assume they got bored of me.

All it seems to take to be enough is a decent wage.
An average sized house.
A few dashes of love
A television, a radio and an icebox full of food.
That's what seems to define modern existence.

I was different, I liked it.
Preferring an endless supply of booze and good records.
As long as the money was there
For both of those
I could say damn the rest, more or less.

People don't care about culture.
They don't seem to realise their actions could shape it if they tried harder.
Instead they rely on the spin doctors to spell it out.
Doctors, lawyers, idiot radio DJs, illiterate fashion models,
Failed pop singers, once great football players
And so on.

That is
upsetting.
That is
...unsettling.

An individual seems to be scared to be an original.
They'd rather take on the stereotype for their sex
And for their age.
This makes them soft and easy to dictate to.
That's a shame, too.

Somehow they were all taught to be content with nothing!
They get the same old deal as everyone else did.
Strangely that seems to be enough.
Afraid to question, afraid to stand out from the hive mind.
It seems unkind, but life to them is towing the standard line.

Are you one of them?
If you said no, do you think it's because you're scared to say yes?

I'm not denying there are decent people.
I'm not replying because there are fun people.
But when it boils down to simple fact
Originality is something every decade seems to lack
More and more and more,
And yet more.

So are you content with nothing?