Utopian Poetry

After a couple of weeks of missing the caravan in the Traveling Poetry Show, I've finally been able to catch up. Here's my interpretation of this week's prompt -- Utopia. By the way, the story that this poem refers to is Ursula Le Guin's story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." If you haven't read it, you should go. Right now.

Topos

I faced them, white board behind me,
blank unsmiling faces starting at me.

Only half had read the story:
an emaciated child, imprisoned in a basement

so that everyone else could live
in blind hedonistic bliss. The language

was difficult, predicates and modifiers
constructed in too tall towers. They gave up

by the end of the first page. I drew a line
on the board, wrote UTOPIA on one side

DYSTOPIA on the other. I asked them,
what does a perfect world look like to you?

The told me: no school, no worries,
money whenever we need it, no responsibilities

no jobs, no nagging parents, teachers or wives, no
children to feed. Their answers spun around me,

no, no, no. They slashed the ties that bound
their bodies to their heavy, weighted lives,

lives of waiting and listening and not doing. So,
I asked, how could this go wrong?

At first they were quiet, unable to imagine
how these limitless lives they just constructed

could topple. We wouldn't know anything,
we couldn't have anything, we'd get bored.

I imagined them drifting, experience to experience
like slowly deflating balloons, imagined

these driftless, half empty lives they try
to escape. I brought them back to the surface,

the root of the words, from the Greek:
topos means place. Dys means bad --

ruined utopias are bad places. U means
not, topos means place. Utopias

are not places, not realities
we can imagine existing, even for a while.