Gooogle by Adam O'Riordan

Ok ladies and gentleman we are going to break from the usual text based format to include a You Tube link! I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed but whenever someone assumes the mantle/guise/pretention of poet they develop 'Poet's Voice'. I know I'm afflicted and Adam is a definite example of what I mean...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ogVYJI86yE

At a poetry business writing day I produced a poem about the internet which I decided to workshop and one of the attendees recommended I hunt down this poem. As a result when I first heard it I didn't like the second half, my mind was more interested in the men interacting with the internet but after listening to it a second time I can see the homecoming queens as part of their journey - that it is not about them but the men's desire for what they meant and still mean to them.

The imagery is fantastic in this piece, men being described as Geishas not only conjures an idea of devotion and unnatural beauty but removes them from their archetypal dominant position. Describing the movement of their fingers as crickets is a beautiful way to capture the sound of keys being tapped. There is also a lot of effective dual imagery; stoking engines provides both that mental imagine of driving the metaphorical engine that is these mens' desires and fuelling the search engines where their obsessions are cast.

The best example of this duality is the final line as although at first it seems a bit cliche and tangential the more I think of it the more I find it extremely clever as he combines seamlessly the real and the intangible. At once the line is both a sign that these men have been searching lost loves so long that the dawn has arrived and that on this day there is an interesting development within the sky while on a more fantastic sense it is as if the Roman goddess of love her self has entered to bear witness to her lonely disciples and reinforcing the overarching them of a yearning for a lover.