Decades of industry speak
has polluted the vernacular
our cultural literacy has reached
dazzling hieghts but our ideas
have become threadbare with use
and the element that made art
is missing, lost in algorithms
you can download on your phone
and pimped out by YouTube
video essays and the sponsor segments
that fuel a burgeoning industry
of future exclusions and despair.
We're all thought transmissions
floating in the atmosphere
lords and ladies and battles
and songs and millennia of
triumph and tragedy and strife
replaced with canned laughter
because the sound of our tears
didn't hit the editor's ear just right.
Ten once in a lifetime catastrophic
events in every decade I've walked
this earth have numbed me to
the sense of awe that those men
had as they watched the cloud
rise over barren American desert.
I have seen Death on the periphery
of my whole lifetime and find
that I am so well acquainted with
it that the fear has been replaced
with a muted sense of resignation.
Yes, of course this is how it is.
This is how it's always been.
If we just keep "yes anding" to
the absurdity of every new day
we might claw our way clear to
the surface and breath rarified air.
Or we'll end up as Sisyphus
pushing the Gordian knot of
centuries of tangled unsolved
problems for all of time.
Or we'll be lost in scattered airwaves
when we fail to hold viewer interest
and the channel gets changed
to a more colorful and exciting
kind of suffering.
We're not historically good
with the Nielsen numbers
because we always shoot
the Blue revision.