I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
unhinged by rote repetitions of market economy truisms,
waylaid by synthetic psychoactive chemicals from pursuing linear thought,
felled by genetic predispositions to various addictions, proclivities,
brought to a full stop by auto-immune disorders.
Was ours the last generation to cower in the closet? Or the first to recognize
how ambiguous the either/or of sexual identity?
Great God Mammon stole many, consumed their youth and optimism
like so many yards of red Twizzler into the gullets of near-anorexics.
LSATs, law school, bar exams: meat grinders parsing the difference between
heroes and zeroes.
Our time became the time when even to ask the question: "What is all this for?"
was to be flung into utter irrelevance.
We jogged ourselves jointless, treadmilled our way to early aneurysms,
all in the name of fitness.
Unprecedented prosperity led many of our finest down fruitless garden paths of
pointless competitive connoisseurship: as if the best cigar, the best Bordeaux,
the freshest oyster, the smokiest Scotch, the highest concentrations of anti-oxidants
in the most organic, non-genetically modified heirloom tomato could save their souls.
As if worshipping at the temple of their own bodies, the ensuing survival of the
self-righteous could prove to the self-selected elite anything other than:
they weren't dead yet.
It seems a matter of luck, not the finely ground fear of middle class prudence, but
I'm not dead yet.
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