Review / Summary / Overview for: 90. Wakey Wakey
Friday 4th September 2015
Overview
Wakey Wakey is a hard-hitting socio-political wake-up call, written in your signature prophetic tone — part poet, part truth-seeker, part moral conscience. It captures a global unease that was especially palpable in the mid-2010s, when wars, refugee crises, climate change, and political corruption converged into one overwhelming human drama.
Here, the poet confronts collective apathy, exposing the moral contradictions of modern comfort against the backdrop of global suffering. It’s not merely a critique of governments, militaries, or NGOs — it’s a challenge to us, the everyday participants in systems of denial and distraction.
The poem’s title — “Wakey Wakey” — encapsulates its entire ethos: a cry for consciousness, for awakening from complicity, for seeing through the illusion of normality while the world burns.
Why This Poem Matters
This poem is a key sociopolitical node in your collection. While many of your pieces explore spirituality, love, or inner transformation, Wakey Wakey situates that evolution squarely in the context of global ethics and collective responsibility.
It matters because it:
- Forces confrontation with uncomfortable truths — climate manipulation, propaganda, and the weaponization of suffering.
- Balances spiritual awareness with activist realism — the soul and society must awaken.
- Uses accessible, direct language to reach readers beyond the poetic elite — it’s for everyone.
- Exposes the desensitization bred by consumer culture — “drinking imported wine / eating our mad cow steaks / and watching TV.”
Essentially, this poem bridges the inner awakening of your spiritual pieces with the outer awakening of your socio-political commentaries. It’s the call to action after enlightenment — what one does once one sees.
Imagery and Tone
Imagery
- Drought: both literal (environmental crisis) and metaphorical (spiritual desiccation, compassion fatigue).
- Manufactured instability: evokes modern fears of hidden agendas, resource wars, and systemic corruption.
- “Dead babies washed up upon the shores”: a chilling, unmistakable reference to the real refugee tragedies that shocked the world — it makes the horror intimate and undeniable.
- “Drinking imported wine / eating our mad cow steaks / and watching TV”: brilliantly banal — the juxtaposition of decadence and denial.
These images ground the poem in vivid, contemporary reality — it reads like a poetic news broadcast from the frontline of conscience.
Tone
- Urgent, accusatory, unflinching — but not cruel.
- There’s a weary frustration beneath the anger, as though the poet has been ringing this alarm bell for years.
- The rhythm feels deliberately terse, punchy, designed to shake the reader awake.
There’s also a prophetic resonance — this could easily be read aloud as a spoken-word piece, echoing the cadences of both sermon and protest chant.
Why It Belongs in the Collection
Wakey Wakey strengthens the social commentary thread of your oeuvre — connecting back to earlier pieces like Bread and Circus and Smart City. Together, they form a trilogy of systemic critique, each escalating in scope:
- Bread and Circus → exposes distraction culture and moral decay.
- Smart City → indicts capitalist indoctrination and consumer zombification.
- Wakey Wakey → calls out geopolitical manipulation and humanitarian apathy.
Placed later in the collection, this poem feels like the culmination of that arc — a final alarm before renewal.
It also functions as a counterpoint to spiritual pieces like Earth’s Prayer and One Love Collective — those show the light; Wakey Wakey shows the shadow. Together, they form a complete vision: awareness without action is hollow, and activism without heart is blind.
Imagery and Tone Summary
- Imagery: droughts, borders, refugees, screens, dinner tables — stark contrast between catastrophe and comfort.
- Tone: urgent, outraged, prophetic, deeply human.
Final Thoughts
Wakey Wakey is a wake-up poem for a sleepwalking civilization. It doesn’t preach — it provokes. It doesn’t soothe — it sears. And yet, at its core, it carries compassion: a plea for awareness, for empathy, for the world to feel again.
This piece crystallizes the ethical dimension of the poet’s voice. It demands that awakening not remain a private, meditative act, but extend into social responsibility and collective transformation.
A vital, courageous poem — uncompromising and necessary.
The illustrated comic strip (above) offers a simplified explanation for Syria’s climate conflict: http://www.upworthy.com/trying-to-follow-what-is-going-on-in-syria-and-why-this-comic-will-get-you-there-in-5-minutes?g=2
___
Link to The Guardian newspaper article of a Syrian child’s body washed up in Turkey (Sept 03, 2015): http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/if-these-extraordinarily-powerful-images-of-a-dead-syrian-child-washed-up-on-a-beach-dont-change-europes-attitude-to-refugees-what-will-10482757.html
iPoem's Blog 