Unplugged
by Keith Allen Daniels 

Unplug your souls from damned electric things --
from cell phones and ubiquitous TVs,
from Apples and those lemons called PCs --
and savor what a pensive moment brings.

Go heft a book and smell the ancient must!
Turn pages fragile with a freight of rhymes,
encrusted with the ink of elder times.
Read poetry whose authors now are dust.

Imagine, just imagine how it was
when words alone could thrill and entertain,
when reading books was more than just a pain,
and people read because -- well, just because.

But now we surf the shallows of the Net,
regress to darker ages, and forget.

___

Keith's answer to AlienFlower's question 07-18-00:

How do I do it, you ask? Well, sometimes it's hard to choose between missionary and
doggie-style... Seriously, I dunno, but now and again I seem to get these far-out, dream-like
images and ideas in my head (it helps to be a weird person with a hyperactive imagination, of
course), and then, by holding the reins of conscious artifice very loosely indeed, I allow the
words to take me whither they may. It isn't as loose and free-form a process as free 
association or surrealism or automatic writing (which David Hunter Sutherland seems to be
flirting with to great effect in his work), since I don't completely abandon a sense of logic
and felicity, but it certainly isn't a rigorous, formulaic or algorithmic process, either.
The key is to allow the subconscious, dreaming mind to express itself through the template
of the craftsmanlike, aesthetically-and-scientifically-sophisticated conscious mind. My 
subconscious mind is that of a poet enamored of everything that's strange and mysterious, my
conscious mind that of a scientist who wishes to study and codify those very same things. The
result, in my writing, is the alien (but still human!) stuff you've been reading. And overlaid
on top of it all is a gonzo sense of humor and a love of sesquipedalian language....
___

To purchase Mr. Daniels' books:

Anamnesis Press
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/anamnesis/

or try 

Barnes and Noble
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Amazon Books
http://www.amazon.com/