Y2K

 

I'm puzzled that the world didn't end.

I think of history as a gaudy balloon whose surface

squirms with special effect images, but inside it's foul

with the stench of gulags and beer hall messiahs.

It's so hard to see what's real with all the shit flying in the air

as the capitalist cyclone erects world markets and economic boom.

 

I sit on the sixth floor across from Battery Park

writing computer manuals for the Empire. The Statue of Liberty

hemorrhages in a window looking out on the last day of the century.

The warheads don't fly. The banks stay open. Wall Street is safe.

A relieved sigh swells inside the throats of newsmen

tired with one more day of packaging the news.

 

If it doesn't pay, it's not real. Lies within lies wrapped in a commercial.

Hollywood Babylon rules the corporate unconscious... we

are what we watched.

Art now means a way to sell something to somebody

who's already drunk with too much.

 

So what if I imagine more blood in the sunset than my peers...

I'm just a hack writer for the Machine with as much need

for a dollar as the next guy, and a growing fear I don't

have the right information I need to keep up.

 

What seemed like love one day becomes a prison, and

the one you loved's

a stranger who'll kill you and himself for a ticket on

the paradise express.

Finding what's worth dying for is uncertain, trembling

like the body of your lover as she orgasms in your ear and tells you

how forbidden love is. Her husband's stolen her art and money,

and he lives in the cellar with a gun waiting for her

to crack. Are we all hostage to demented love?

Reduced to dirty marriages,

rape farms, and rampage

under cover of night that deposits bodies

in unmarked graves?

 

History can't penetrate us the way an organ or knife does,

it envelopes us and sends the news across a great distance.

We link one end of Armageddon with another and hear nothing

but hysteria and the bizarre ranting

of a society addicted to its power to make the trains run on time.

 

            -- December 1999