How are your check bones under the
layers of flesh on your face?
Does it hurt when you smile?
My generation last vestige of
the Cold War, bomb drill and the
Red Menace, right
watching live via satellite the utter
collapse of what on paper was Soviet might.
I was promised a world without war
Pax Americana victorious.
Revolutions in science and technology,
navy bases closing, airfields shut down.
Nukes disarmed and defanged, dangling
like post-orgasm cocks – that special glow
knowing that the mission was won without
a firefight (just U2 overflights)
One and done, walking into the sunset.
Have you seen documentaries about World War I?
How men were machine gun fodder, bodies thrown
out on the front so new rules of war could be drawn up?
Total war. Total destruction.
My generation gets to think tank better ways to kill by
remote control. Progress in peacetime.
Our future is introverted
spun freely off of the three ton line
of Orwell’s 1984 –
the past a malleable production of paper scraps,
digitized microfilm, and mashed-up multi-glottal speechmaking
gerrymandering, wholehearted pandering.
This is the wonder of now!
Gone is the sweet smell of bacon making khaki suited
under 40 veterans question why children
flash in their eyes during a Wendy’s lunchtime
burger feed. That’s it, right there – the smell you need
is human under the green glow of night vision phosphorus.
From human meat roasting after flashbomb firefights,
burnt hair tinge with that sizzle on the streets of
Hiroshima, summer 1945;
to the delights of an air-conditioned bunker in
Afghanistan as a drone drills a neighborhood
for bloodless thrills. You’re still smiling?
Goddamn this is progress!
Goddamn the American dream is manifest!
Arcadian utopia to arcade buttonmashing,
we have arrived!
The Numinous Cosmos 