Millennial.
As I settle into my comfortable chair,
Air conditioned and bourgeoise,
White as an ivory cloud, and floating,
Just as removed from the earth
The black earth that we forget we’re from
The clay that forms our fingernails
Bakes in the sun and cakes into fat cracks
Crazy paving the road to our own manumission
If we had the ears to listen.
We buy glittered books to read the lines
Between the lines between our fingers
Even though we know that’s not their point.
But it makes us feel special, and clever.
Millennial bourgeoisie, floating through life
In hot-air snow globes, insulated from the outside.
And outside our glass screens, humans have the dignity
Flayed out of them
It is hoovered up from their corpses
And cleaned off, and packaged, and sold to us.
We saw that in a documentary once,
It shocked us, but didn’t change us,
It was another entertainment,
A passing of time we can spin doctor into social capital.
Keep our snow globe homes squeaky clean,
We can see through the glass
Into space
Into the ocean depths
Into other peoples’ bodies
Into our own holes
We watch and we watch, and we don’t see
Or maybe catch a glimpse as the world floats below us
Earthy and wholemeal, and organic, and raw
And diseased, and riddled with toxins
We gulp and gasp, and look away quickly.
Something we can’t touch is preferable.
Ours
But forgotten, so that it’s not ours until we remember.
And we eat cake to feel good.
Remember
The ancestors who did horrible things to stay alive
They were hardened, like crushing a can all the way down
We think: poor devils, how times have changed
Then, we remember those outside our glass screens,
But that’s different, surely,
More removed even though it’s now.
And we try to forget again.
We eat cake to feel good.
There is a pill you can pop that will dissolve your reality
It will show you that we are all one and that love is the only truth.
It will help you to swallow the sweetness of your life,
This medicine.
It will help you fuck and laugh and then it will go,
And you will,
Finally,
Be able to cry, because you can pretend it was the pill.
Anonymous Poet, 2020