Economics of the New Fade

I’ve found that people struggle
whether they realize it or not
to do the right thing. Change
is always on the wind. If we
know where to look.

Of course, it always starts
at the beginning, with some
new generation considering
things anew, refusing in
their early years to accept
what seems to have become
permanent for their elders,
old rules and old truths,
the theory of relativity
explained not by Einstein
but by rock and roll, which
no youth can embrace without
it being condemned by those
who heard what came before it,
rejected, like a martyr, not
for what it is but for what
it isn’t, the same thing
they always knew.

Rebels always have a cause,
it’s just that, to them, the cause
is not what matters, but the simple
will to live the way that makes
sense to them, not to someone else.
They’re more willing to take, for
granted, for free, what others
invested their lives in, as if
a life is meant to be devoted
to things and not to ideals,
as if ideals and things are
mutually exclusive, held in check
by systems that impose hierarchies
and declare heresies merely
as a matter of course.

I did not climb aboard the bus
because I saw no relevance in it;
I was content to walk along behind it,
no need for speed but all the will
to accept what it stood for, a means
to reject tenets, but to exist
outside the limits of the thoughts
that fueled it. Most people,
though they define and reject
the economics of transportation,
are defined and rejected by their own
thoughts, and they never know it. We
barrel faster along the road
all the time, causing transitions
to flip by without our truly
understanding them, all the words
in the world to describe them
but no dictionary to define them,
too hip to be square.

Modern pirates steal because
they’re ahead of the curve,
and everyone thinks they’re
doing the right thing, and they
are, but they use the wrong words,
because they don’t know what
they mean, only what they think,
lost in a jumble of righteousness,
a new religion without a name
or creed or temple, but coffers
all the same, a need to sustain
terms that are no longer relevant.

We’re learning, but we’re not
there yet, cancelling world debts,
singing the new hymns, believing
what is to be believed, but praising
what we cannot sustain just because
it looks so pretty. Pretty without
substance is the only true
enemy we have, a bully pulpit
like a rebel without a cause,
railing against the wind.