Let’s Pretend

“Let’s pretend,” the children say,
as they hurry off to play.
But that same action has often blown
up in the face of those full-grown.
Escape is easier these days
with all the various means and ways
we have to skirt reality
by what we listen to and see.

On television or movie screen,
we might pretend that what we’ve seen
is more reality than fact,
until we find that we react
so vividly to what is fiction
that it becomes a real addiction
that deflects our full attention
from that we do not dare to mention.

Escape increasingly is sought––
deflecting us from what we ought
really to be dealing with.
Instead of truth, we choose the myth.
Global warming, poverty,
Isis, the disparity
between the classes and the use
of meth and alcohol abuse.

Children wielding guns because
it is what every game now does.
Adults displaying their frustration
at our society’s obfuscation
of the truth of what goes on
in a society gone wrong.
Wealth governs us then shields us from
how far from truth we’ve really come.

We watch pretty fantasies
that entertain or shock or please
filling us with false elation
that is not of our own creation.
So life becomes vicarious,
distracting us from various
problems where we might have acted
if we had not been distracted

by the gross banality
passing for reality
of made-up people who act and preen
on TV or computer screen.
There’s something to be said, you see
in favor of reality
when dealing with the painful facts
of what it is one’s own life lacks.

The prompt word today was “pretend.”