Wear that Millennial Stamp with Pride

I want you to stop and consider something for a moment. Our generation is in a truly unique position in the history of the world. We are the first to have not only grown up with the Internet, but grown up on the Internet. This is the critical difference between us and everyone gone before us.

Call us the Millennials. Call us the next Lost Generation. But there is something more to us.

Ok, screw that headline.

After all, it is they that come up with the terms: we surf the Net. We cruise the Web. We are lost in Virtual Space, careening through the system of Tubes that constitute what is, to them, nothing more than an overly addictive game.

But it is not a game. One plays a game. We don’t “play” the Internet. It is as critical and ever-present in our modern environment as the grass beneath our toes or the atmosphere that holds us to it. It is not external—it is connected. It is not alternate reality, but another layer of reality itself.

Which is to say, the Internet is not something we use. It’s something we live—on it, inside it, alongside it, frolicking with it down memory lane, what have you—but it is an inescapable facet of our existence. We use the Internet to keep in touch with those both near and far, to organize, to research, to prepare. We plan with it, chart calendars on it, study, and dream through the wondrous expanse of its pages. Friends and enemies rise and fall online. Love and hate flourishes and dies in its expanse. Some of the greatest debates (and the tackiest) in the history of mankind are no doubt, out there, in the expanse of the Internet…Online, eternal, waiting.

For us, the Internet has never been something we needed to “learn.” It is an evolution—another entity, sitting alongside us in the classroom, aging and lengthening before our eyes. It is continuous. In it, we grow, and through us, it grows. It is. It simply is.

What more need I say? The Net is a part of us. It’s not tacky sci-fi, not some Utopian paradise—it is, at its simplest, the collection of thoughts, ambitions, emotions, which embody Us. It is us. Let the history of mankind be writ large upon it.

And let the folks on it learn to start treating one another as equals. But hey, that’s just commonsense in facet of life, isn’t it?

…isn’t it?

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Self-Destruction

Shadow in the light

the fawning eyes to name

casting bones and scrubbing runes

not for shaman by the same

but for pretentious by its game.

Belief in self

twisted, twined, no longer paramount

a confession of the eyes

we named a pedestal of no account—

a devil’s playground at the fount.

Drifting through the gravel

the hero left to solace of the sand,

a world boxed in by seeds of its devotion

the drifting ides of foreign hand

hemmed us into falling land.

Would a little humility kill?

“Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts.  It means freedom from thinking about yourself at all.” 
~William Temple

Fettered Rise

Image by © Chris Galford.

Darkness

Begets salvation.

–

Closed eyes embrace

Wide-spaced longing,

Riveted in fire like

Old angels lacquered

With the doubt—

–

The weight,

They will come to call it,

It lies heavy on the backs

That would toil clouds

To submission.

–

Naked passions

Circumvent the sense of it,

Armani dreams, Gucci heart

Wing-tipped longing stands

Fleshy and forgotten.

–

Icarus saw this

Falling.

* My latest work for One Shoot Sunday. Based on the images I provided this week when I graffiti’d One Stop. Yes, that’s right – my travels around Lansing have yielded a great deal of graffiti photos, and this week we decided to plaster this little offering of rebel-art up for all you fellow poets to pour over. So have a look, see what catches your fancy, and enjoy!

Stooped Celebration

"The Bootmaker," image property of Rob Hanson.

Stooped celebration

Thread by thread

Stringing out the walkers

Life of leather—

Toiling at the standing grace

Of other souls.

 

Breaths ride the strands,

Divinity locked in rasping labor;

Noon passes stained glass

With a smile—

the hands know but the one song,

they cannot sing it with regret.

* My latest work for One Shoot Sunday. Based on the prompt from my interview this week with HDR photographer Rob Hanson. Be sure to check back in next week as well, for part two of the interview and more of Mr. Hanson’s lovely work.

World Poetry, Part Deux

For day two’s favorite poetry selection, I give you English poet John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud:”

 

John Donne, care of Wikimedia Commons.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and souls delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sicknesse dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

~John Donne

Armani Pride

Armani, sir, don’t you mind

The scales underneath the silk—

My tongue is worth a hundred souls,

My pen a thousand more.

The world, my throne, self-carved—

I think mere mortal knowing

Might yet be deigned to see

Some tracest memory

Of wealth, innumerable, that lies

Within this fairest grace.

–

Before the pride, yet rides The Fall,

One-winged angel recompense

With Hell and Fire resolute

This passion, wild, divine

Will never bow nor know

Another master but its own—

Smile through the pain,

For you and thee are nothing but

This maddened laughter spouts

From believer, knower, all.

–

Cast me down, you break me down,

It is of your own pathetic drives—

Kill it, beat it, des-e-crate it,

Such a base begotten crave

Of jealousy, and raunched salivation

Of those below the knowing

Of this manicured salvation—

All I need, the dollar, plastered

Forming yet eternal

The foundations of my history.

* Another poem for the wonderful Monday Poetry Potluck, as hosted by Jingle Poetry, and those lovely poets Amanda and Kavita! The theme this week: the Seven Deadly Sins! Lust was appealing, I must admit, but then pride came along in mind, and low and behold, these words sprouted–hope you enjoy.

Upon the Precipice

Eyes open to the brink

I stand

Broken upon the edge

And though the sky is beating down

You are still above me

Always looking down.

Stretching for the dreams

Beyond your clouds

I burned within the strain

This arrogance has wrought,

And as the fire surged

I took it for desire

Obsession blinds

Focus the mind, focus the soul

Too late

All crumbling down,

The earth races

The sky screams

And I am tumbling through

This dear embrace

To something far more real.