PAD Day 10: The Future is Now!

I'm late today - I don't know why two relatively simple prompts gave me so much trouble, but it's taken all day to come up with something worthy of posting. First, though, a couple of shout-outs to follow bloggers who are participating in daily writing prompt challenges: Vince Gotera's blog  The Man with the Blue Guitar (I especially like his Day 9 poem which used my "playlist" poem prompt that I suggested for NaPoWriMo, to create an entertaining poem in the "hay(na)ku" form), and Joseph Harker's naming constellations, whose link you can find in my sidebar.

Anyway, the dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "future" poem, and (2) write an "advertising" poem.  The latter can be a poem in the form of an advertisement or one about advertising. My reference to that prompt is rather peripheral, and I don't think it's my best poem so far this month, but for what it's worth, here ya go:

The World of Tomorrow

Now that we have arrived in the future,

it doesn't look much like we imagined it

in all those old advertisements

and Popular Science magazine covers.

We have no flying cars. Folks don't zip

around the city in pneumatic tubes.

There are no condos on the moon.

And from here on, the world of tomorrow

may look much like today, depending

on how close your "tomorrow" is.

We can't expect a sea change of technology

overnight.  Yet every day we see ads

that tell us the future is already here:

little robots that clean our floors,

wristwatch-sized smart phones,

and soon, cars that drive themselves.

Moving through it all day by day,

our progress seems incremental,

yet looking back at all those predictions

from decades ago, we got some of it right,

and looking forward, we can only imagine.