I sense loss and yearning all around
I used to chalk it up as a personal hurdle to jump
or just the feeling of aging while the youth still goes on
Yet I think I this malaise is widespread
Impacting all of us in our glitching global trade

I used to think the issue was there’s just too much now
Too much to watch, listen, and taste
You don’t need the hunt anymore
Don’t need to wait or pay some exorbitant price
I used to feel overstimulated by the streams
and just could not decide
I still feel, it’s not that we want to do the thing,
but we yearn to want to want to do the thing
again

Is that all that’s changed?
Those who are not ready to be creators
will certainly not be ready to be curators
Freed ourselves from DJs and TV programming
but what control have we flailed ourselves into?
Wasting hours a day watching 30 second videos
whose categories are heavily curated
impersonally, just for you
Remember when user preferences worked
and in searches they wouldn’t hide the whole list
of all that was relevant and new?

I have an extra dry sense of humor
up here in the most sarcastic city in the country

Down south, they just can't figure it out
They think I'm dumb or
should be institutionalized for the things I say that
they just take to heart with 6 grade reading levels at best
There's no forethought, let alone critical analysis afterwards
Down there
you say what you mean or paint on fake niceties
You leave all the **** talking for when this or that person
leaves the room

There's no cold distance
Strangers will ask where you go to church
No respect that folks may have better things to do
A panopticon of middle school gossip and small talk
so you're never alone

I wish my brother never left
He came back and won't talk to me
after I gave his complaining back to him
in too clever remarks
In Carolina, you're lucky if they get it
on the drive back home

I don’t play my mandolin everyday anymore,
let alone my guitar or tin whistles
I can’t let this die
I listened to 7 year old Japanese math rock
and want just a speck of that
An identity where I can sift right through
all this mediocre destruction all around
No one even has the gall to admit they’re killing
or the decency to even cover it up anymore
They videotape themselves dancing and
murdering kids for lebensraum
then turn around and say “no we’re not”

I’m tired of surface level house maintenance
followed by immobile phone scrolls
I’m looking for that lesson we’ll all learn
after finally going too far
I won’t play the victim or the hero no more
I did my part and now I’m too old
I need deeper art to escape samsara for good
and maybe that’s the best I can do comrades

I’m sick of details grown so scattered and thin
My whole past feels like entrails
smeared across vast desserts
There used to be rainforests here
but now it’s hard to find the pictures

Just when things almost get too competent and nice
they let decadence do its worse
out of fear that the improvements would make goods and services
too cheap not to be free
Socialism’s bad for business owners
so we lay off the workers and overcharge even more
Let the octogenarian billionaires buy up more water and air
to keep the fellas in the favelas gnashing and grim

Bunker complexes, spaceships, missiles coated in spent uranium;
these are all more important than starving children
Why do the poor keep having poor kids?
Still a conundrum
We gave them a chance to compete
some ephemeral time ago and they blew it
What can we do?
We tried to teach a man to fish…
Imagine Jesus Christ just giving folks fish and bread
for nothing in return?

I’m shirtless after
getting too hot in the best kitchen stool spot
It’s where the dog will leave me alone for a sec
It’s a weird winter
every year now, but they say the Great Lakes are
the best place to ride climate change out
It’s been too cold, now it’s getting too hot for this time of year
so the old Watkins Glen hoodie was too much
I almost ripped the front neck like an 80s girl
but I didn’t have the strength
If walks are still out of the question,
I better start doing physical comedy
around the house like Three's Company because
I said I was going to

We could have had it all
we still could
We reached peak performance
we almost reached Star Trek replicators
The whole world enjoying life saving advancements
over a hundred years
Only for it to decline for the first time
instead of just sabotaged into a slowdown like before
Those billionaires want to stay relevant
Even though they’re beyond useless
They’re a detriment to our democratic progress
just to preserve their status as economic royalists
who decry the decline of Victorian social deference

Remember Kurt Vonnegut talking about his school
in the era of almost proficient public funding?
He was excited to have a jazz band
Until these types of things were deemed unimportant
for those who may need them most

Now we have the technology to exceed the speed and competence
of the 80s, 90s, and aughts
but the the profit motive just gets stronger and more depersonalized
We’ll teach them to fish by killing them all

We really thought our liberation for a second
would be found in raunchier shows on TV
less than 20 years ago
They'll be another Comics Authority
to come for what's deemed derogatory
but not really to advance the morality
they tricked the masses to believe

It will start all over
they'll commodify what gradually becomes allowed
over 50 years

I tip my hat to the contempt of corrupt government
but please don't mistake that as being against a collective good
I am an anarcho-socialist cause the proliferation of the individual is only possible in a welfare society
All you capitalist bootlickers will hustle yourself back to serfs
or worse
Where the noble few are the only ones to live free

Now they propagandize you with a promise
you can join their game and be a Capitalist too
Yet the unworking economic royalists
will not abdicate their thrones
So they want you to be grateful for all they provide
a chance to labor under them and be dazzled with distractions
which serfs of the past could never know
Slow economic mobility to a halt
They want a return to Victorian deference above all

Contrary to the pious coldness of our days
us well meaning folks need to realize
it takes grace and tact to deceive and to be deceived
Like playing with a child or a dog
you turn a ball, and just a ball
into a big game hunt

Without the deception that catches us,
the competition, the pageantry, and exaggeration,
we lose interest
We were never not children all along

This too is a game;
wearing plain suits and solely spectating sports
just to out adult each other
So rich men can golf and hunt
wolves from helicopters