12.27.2019
Howl derive
written for the Dunk Poet Tokyo’s Howl-themed event
i saw the best minds of my generation still-born by the dull
tide of 21st century occupations and preoccupations,
in the midst of it they exist instead as diabetic kernels of
affectation, slack-jawed with their digital diaries and digital lives,
digital friends and digital battles, digital money, digital
love
it used to be that the fruits of our labor come always after
the beads of sweat and actual flex (not the flex of lazy linguistic and digital audience)
now all it takes is a template and a hope or a lie, anybody
can be anything and everybody did
easy to build, easy to break
we break like stacks of cards in the way of a gust, behind our digital lives, playing out on a tiny screen
it’s a disease of the mind, it’s our society’s disease
–
in the train i see the best minds of my generation filed
as anonymous figures lamenting the death of the dream
we are living and breathing but are silent,
unceremonial statues hunched over invisible treasures, silently nursing fissures that burn,
- -
beginning from eleven years ago
i had my earliest fissures, all thanks to a love too heavy i was also so drunk with life
i was sixteen and just gradually but also quickly as if it happened all of a sudden, the dark of this world and the dark of my life came into view
since then i’ve lived with an abyss living in the pit of my stomach,
my chest a well almost always on the verge of drought,
sometimes when it’s full i hear tinkling in my ears from the happy fullness, the glory of it all, like bells in the wind or like a lover’s laughter
we all wear fissures that burn, he’s had twelve years, her some five
we wear ourselves thin each day we walk the same old streets year after year, haunted by our “somedays” and “maybe laters”, you know, we’ll get around to it or so we always think, and then one day we stop saying them out loud
as you’d get accused of repetition and bore,
five years ago she had life in her eyes, before the smoke would envelope them in chain-like fashion
when they clear you’d see only sleep in her eyes, or cheap liquor condensed in the flesh
- -
what we do with most of our days is what makes our lives
most days we do what we don’t want, in the remaining time we
think about what we want
sometimes we do what we want and think it’s all we want
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