You ask them something,
you get a subtle broadside of snidery,
a tone between
annoyance and haughtiness,
with a lazy stop at contempt
for the stupidity and
poor technological savvy inherent
in your question,
or in any question at all.
You will die of starvation,
like one of the ancien regime in an oubliette,
waiting for them to say
"please" or any other of
the weak-minded civilities
which were cherished by
our formerly social species,
once comfortable in its skin and its sense
of communal decency.
They're as jackals who will
eat until they die from engorgement,
rather than suffer another cur a scrap.
It seems their whole lives
lay grim and terrifying before them,
as a succession of
stampeding black fridays:
Life is now bloodsport.
In their hearts they are fierce freemasons
and dangerous gangsters,
and not unproud of it.
They learn very well
from their elders, as any
new wave of youngsters do:
Highly competitive they are,
but so easily distracted that
no contest with them
is ever fair or desirable.
Civility and manners
either frighten them in their anxiety,
or are seen as a network of booby traps
to avoid if one wishes to be known
as the most important thing,
for which we lack a precise term,
apart from that precious
amerikan brick of a word, "cool."
It seems that
opening or holding
a door for someone they
do not wish to have sex with
is to them a saintly act,
a victory over evil or the animal-headed
ancient alien theory gods
whose mythology they are nursed with now,
and so they stand there,
door held,
jackal faces declined,
frantic with the delayed need to swab
and fondle their phones,
eager for
the life-sized
trophy of themselves to be awarded,
for supererogatory altruism.
Cool is so crucial that Sorority bitches don't even
look different from regular women anymore.
There is a mass merging
towards a marketable and
sexy bacchanalian middle.
They hear little
but the narcissist claptrap
of their own nihilist thoughts,
because their ears are stuffed with
audio tech
and shady music
of the kind we refuse to describe here
beyond noting
the rubbish spine
of repetitive,
hook-laden,
digitized, dirge-like open satanism jutting from its smelly ass.
An awful croaking in the mud
is their dead music.
...Ideas echo pointlessly
in the cavern of their ego-powered minds,
because they learn to value nothing
but what is practical and most modern.
They have heard of
a thing called Nein-eleven
but the numeral set implies
math or troubling
cerebral work, so
they believe they flee from the figure,
but eat it calmly
for all six meals of the day,
in reality.
You have never seen such
marvelous,
selfied,
sculpted,
excruciatingly self-conscious bodies.
Thews upon thews
rippling, asses thick
and fecund with BGH and
insoluble lattes.
The body-type index
has ballooned at both extremes:
quite a few now are as fat as
the King's prized cattle,
while many others worship themselves at the gym
and dispense the luxurious pleasure
of their hard bodies to
all, from their elastic clothing
and muscle shirts.
You have never heard such
at once
confident but insecure talk:
Brainless, laced with invective, filthy
words, and the latest
degenerate copycat slang
which each financial quarter
sounds more like violent
gibberish
from an under-served junior high.
"Savage" this and "killing" and "smashing"
and "crushing" that.
Measurably worse than
previous generations,
they're drugged on pheromones
and hale youthful vanity.
Half are numbed or excited on behavioral meds.
They cannot read poems.
Poems do not make sense and are silly.
The reading of such dead forms,
they suspect, may cost
them money in the long term.
Instead, their minds are infested with
Opinions
and notions that are
valued only for their currency and sharpness.
They are sybarites and aesthetes,
but not the good kinds.
Their pleasure
is an embarrassment and a pain to the world.
Their art is Culture
and their culture is popular,
and it is slop.
It's formed of self-adoring capitalism's
bloody sloppy seconds.
This explains late rap music and Tindr and
certain kinds of EDM festivals,
and the oceans of ink
covering their flesh.
Perhaps they perform
so diffidently and
awkwardly while standing in the many lines and
queues of civilization because
they are aware that modern life
is one big shuffling coil
towards an absurd end,
with never
any longer a comment on this absurdity.
Where is the profit in reflection.
Stampedes and rock slides don't reflect.
We have done a right fine
job squeezing these
poor, frightened
Attack Lemmings into
the sausage-skin leg-wear
that both male and female
slouch and ponce about in.
We shoe-horned them into their shallow and
malformed selves,
by our neglect for our own
souls and for the soil of
fertile human belonging:
which we once called Society..
nothing grows here but cancer and
yes, still,
the sick infant of hope
in ....
some tough to imagine future where
all this madness, deceit, and cruelty
is cleaned away.
Everything may not be ok.
we don't choose
our bodies or our minds,
but we choose what to do with them,
don't we.
