prose poem about my generation's political and social shortcomings |
Here we find ourselves in Post-Op America. Surgically inoculated, castrated and spayed, severed from any matriarchal or patriarchal great feminine or masculine spirit. Genderless entity no longer holding any power. Gorged on the golden promises and dreams of the rich. Sucking up filth and the excess of filth, growing satisfied or disinterested. Laying on mountains of refuse and ruin. The carrot’s always held on a stick just out of reach. We follow after it drooling, begging for pats on the back and a wad of cash, slobbering on the bloody streets and stumbling into our own graves before reaching it. Caught in that trap, feeling the empty back-pats and smelling the carrot, everyone congeals. The public is that gorged genderless blob. Under the command of a single black beady little eye. The tiny eye controls the mass of the blob, takes a globule of it and fashions a sword, waves it madly at other blobs, severing and consuming them, adding to its mass. The units of the blob are happy. Blindfolded in the American flag, like justice herself, growing fatter and drunker, betraying their birthrights; justice and everyone, blinded and wayward, suffering the mockery of its own conscience and the beady eye, still struggling against themselves for entry into the eye. Chasing the inoculating carrot toward a door that doesn’t exist, never existed; that if it existed, would open only to laugh in the faces of those the eye rests upon. So we wander near it, then back into the blob, sexless and impotent, holding votes with no weight like bombs in our hands that weren’t filled with any powder. Fuses lit for the inevitable dud, the letdown that keeps repeating itself. Light the bomb, keep lighting it, it must blow one day. The eye wouldn’t lie. No sense in getting down on yourself blob citizen, you aren’t dead yet right? Where’s the life in you. Didn’t your parents riot in the streets? Didn’t they love morality and dignity? Does self-respect skip a generation? Is it like twins? While the bones of the blob crumble and disintegrate, and the eye of command gleams and smiles, and waves its sword more furiously, cutting itself and anything it can reach…do you feel happy watching it on tv, behind a game of angry birds on your smartphone, with a Disney channel all-star soundtrack, and an impending layoff, and an inevitable foreclosure? I hope you don’t. I ripped my American Eagle t-shirt and spit on it, throwing it into an endlessly expanding trash heap. I don’t want the carrot anymore. I don’t like the beady eye anymore. I got sick of the putrid smell of burning and rotting flesh emanating from that brandished burnished sword, the smell of my generation, from this country and others, being pawned for control and dominance against their will, or with their broken will. I can’t figure out what to do except to look at it. And to participate no longer. |