I Refuse (posted 4/3/18)
What exactly is the reason for your refusal?
Why not join the main game?
Everyone is winning.
To be a winner, what do you have to lose?
Maybe you’ll be lucky. Un.
This is a difficult poem. It asks questions. It offers no answers. This poem will get you before you get it. It is confusing, puzzling, and tempting to ignore. Whatever this poem is, it is not that important.
The poem begins with a question a reader might ask the poet: “What exactly is the reason of your refusal?” We don’t know what the poet refusing so how could we know the reason why. Whatever the poet is saying “no” to, it is the “main game.” Everybody plays and all players win. It’s just the way things are. We are used to it. We like it. Why would anyone refuse to join in? “To be a winner, what do you have to lose?” Strange question. Winners don’t lose. Do they? In order to win, do winners give something up? Consider your attitude toward life if you answered this question with “no”. Consider your attitude toward life if you answered this question with “yes”. We might suppose that we are lucky to be part of such a great social/economic machine that provides so much for us. And in many ways we are fortunate. But what have we lost in order to gain? Something? Nothing?
The “un” at the end of the poem is not a typo. It is a misplaced prefix to the word “lucky” suggesting unlucky. The out-of-place “un” offers the merest hint that we have lost some quality or talent in exchange for the conveniences of our adjusted lives.
Think of this the next time you are sitting in traffic on your morning commute. Think of this the next time a recorded voice on the phone offers you five numbered choices. Think of this when you read a hate-laced message on social media.
This poem is not a call to retreat from contemporary life, to go back to the “good old days.” There are many good things in the modernity we have woven around ourselves. This poem is a call to awareness, to acknowledge the human price we have paid for our progress. Perhaps we can reincorporate what we have lost into what we have found.