Every era that has ever been
Has engaged in the auto-dissection
Of their yellowing underbellys.
Yes, every generation has predicted
that the end is nigh,
That god is on their side;
But the devil has a crowbar
And is busting out of the basement.
Each decade is a mimicry of the last.
Different fashions, same trends
And always, with a fool on the hill.
A lonely steel harmonica can pierce the airwaves
Across space and time,
Through the grooves and crackles
To enthral an audience,
And to beguile that every generation
Into believing in their autonomy,
Their solitude,
With a fate independent of all those centuries past.
Through every disembodied spew of Dylan lyrics,
Or the corporeal and common alienation
Sympathised in every Wilde reference,
Comes the same fury at the chaos of a world
That is no more than indifferent at the plight of the people it houses.
Indeed,
Every generation has sought to either
Cure the ills of the Earth;
Or else set lighter fluid to the lot.
This stretches back to the first blood-spattered edition of the Bible,
And further, much further.
To all of the captains,
The heroes,
The anti-heroes,
The road gritter,
The malevolent dictator,
The schoolteacher,
The emancipated woman
And the borderline feminist.
To every young child who is reluctant to take the spotlight,
Or look you in the eye,
Ask questions, or speak out.
For every one of those who at some point were labelled
‘maladjusted’.
And so the Pharaohs and Caesars are all but gone now,
Replaced by the big-wigs,
The fat-cats,
The purple hearted,
The playboys -
The men in suits.
But they are all the same.
The same behind the decadence of
A solid gold sarcophagus
Or an Armani pair of shades.
They all built their empire on shifting sands.
And so we will all kick and scream
To our own tone and our own time
At the indignity of the world.
At our bespoke knowledge
To deal with all inconvenience
But that which privates the preclusion
Of any and all major slaughters of justice.
As for that young child,
With the lack of eye contact -
And all that he will become:
He will sit. And he will type.
He will type until his words fall beyond that
Of the spiralling noises inside his mind
And blossom into something pure and ugly and beautiful.
He will sit and he will write
To forget.