Cadence

You are not your Blackberry.
You are not your 3G network.
You are not your mortgage crisis,
Your student loan,
Not even your blog,
Even though it’s okay to admit that you own one.

You are not your soul-sucking cashier position
At Wal-mart.

You are not your rising gas prices.
You are not your peanut butter recall,
And yes, I miss my Reeses,
Don’t we all?
But you are not your fertility treatments
And you are not the children they may produce.

You are not the American Idol,
But you may be an idle American,
And if the president is black,
What is that?
Nothing but a pigmentation
A figmentation
Of someone else’s imagination.

You are not your Iraq war
You are not your foreclosed store
Just because you like to kiss boys or girls
Does not make you a whore
And if it does,
Who cares?
You are not your third ex-boyfriend.

You are not your Facebook.
You are not your YouTube.
Your MySpace belongs to someone else
And your college degree probably does too.
Your reality TV lacks reality
And in all actuality,
Let’s hope it remains so.

You are not your laptop,
You are not your hybrid car,
You are not your compact fluorescents
Or your antidepressants,
And you are not your growing waistline.

You are this: a human life,
A single second in the tick-tock cadence
Of this eternal marching clock.