The Damned Generation

A writer for The First Post
journal I'm subscribed to
in my gmail account used
this term, "The Damned Generation"
to describe the adults
now transitioning from college.

He meant to imply that
it's our sorry fate to
inherit a world that
doesn't seem to have
a use for us, and hey,
it's basically what
I've been saying in
my poetry for the past
nine years, so I'm
fairly happy that
someone else has pointed
it out.

We're the Damned Generation.

No one seems to have use
for us, our ideas, or our
potential. Oh, our
culture is more ready
for us than it has ever been,
but the truth of the matter is,
when you get right down to it,
is that Obama's Message of Hope
basically negates us.

Obama's Message of Hope
is basically a lifeline
to the failures of the past,
even though the Message
says everything but.

Obama's Message of Hope
really is a message of hope,
but no one really understands
it yet; they're still
clinging to the hope that
Hope merely means we can
still salvage what came before
rather than set about the
business of the radical new.

We're the Damned Generation
because we're the product
of the radical new, but
the failure of the Watchmen
film, of our basic failure to
really acknowledge genius
like Grant Morrison and
ability to appreciate Lost
only when it's shiny, is indication
that the radical new
may be ready, but the New Fade
isn't.

The horrible secret of
the New Fade is that it's
really more conservative
than it is liberal, not
good conservative but bad,
not good liberal but bad.

The New Fade is picky,
like the messy public interests
of the public, when private
hopes don't really mesh with Hope
and time is our enemy
just like we always feared it was.

Time, the Metaphysics of Time,
the Economics of Time,
the Politics of Time,
even the Psychology of Time,
really amounts to the Final Frontier.

In Star Trek, which I can
talk about because it's
finally popular again,
the Final Frontier really
only ever was the New Frontier,
bigger, better, but no one
liked to say why, because
it spoke about real hope,
not just the Politics of Hope,
or the Politics of Courage,
though courage is a thing
about as thankless as
trying to remain dry
in a land quickly filling up
with the water broken levees
never really could hold back
for long, drowning on dry land,
like the martyrs do.

The Damned Generation
will not be televised,
though it is a product
of that time; it's far
more cool to walk around
with portable devices
and pretend to be plugged in
while all you're really being
is alone, the new cool
of the New Fade, the old fool
of past times when, hey,
Star Trek was cool.

The Damned Generation
is a product of the New Intellectual.

The Damned Generation
will someday get its due,
but probably in an index,
like all good people do,
a product of real perspective.