To Young Americans (On The Occasion of Barack Obama's Speech to America's Young People)

To Young Americans (On The Occasion of Barack Obama's Speech to America's Young People)

Enfant Terribles, their bodies built like prison cells
Layer upon layer like termite's nests
Into reasonable, responsible, important,
Big cogs with shiny teeth running like clockwork
Built by the inexhaustible kernel deep inside, now fatally radioactive
Waning; saddled in that monstrous machine.

Standing,
The clanking adult in front of the microphone
Spinning for our own good the invisible safety net
That binds millions in
With millions more autonomous shed cicada skins
Cascading forth from their heads
Falling invisibly from their words
In swarming, spreading hordes
Each trailing a dark thread of
Sickly sweet ethereal silk

Each borne by carrier wave--
Dead shells of iron clad sentiments
Forged in the depths of grandiose self-delusion
By the galvanized clanking black knight
Naturally emulating an unmanifestible truth
That should be intimated to us by real adults.

Scrambling, buzzing through listening ears
They search of any purchase in gray matter
A thrill for self-abuse, an unsinkable Titanic self-identity
A hidden, unwavering, yet popular selfish demand
The spark of wanting to believe in cruel comforting illusions
The belief in a life lived under a mask of fun-loving deception
As the human condition
Any and more, but something firmly rooted
In which to bury their anchored threads
And this done, like stinging bees, they die.

And thus, the threads take hold
Surprisingly, not tenuous so that years later
The threads lie stretched taut across the world
By those years of blind, desperate obedience
For the lost, deafened listeners
Years of material consolation
The years of the pupating cicada.

A form finally rises off the ground
Composed of these stakes and lines;
These people and word-borne silken threads
Taking shape as the cylindrical central nexus
Rises eerily, as if by some malevolent actor
Whose timing seems fitting, obvious
Like the lights dimming before a concert
Popularly unhindered, it slowly turns
As though it were an old record player
Playing a warped recording of a 1920s calliope
In an echo chamber.

So does the ethereal tent rise, turning
Accelerating, thrilling, morbid, groaning under its weight
Its rigidity increasing from centrifugal force
The ancient merry-go-round of war culture
Thriving in the nuclear age
Far from the battlefield, though ever closer
People's lives in the merry-go-round
Fly apart all over the Earth.

With the grace of God will there be
In those days of the wrecked abandoned fair ground
Carnival food wrappers in clouds of dust
The old refrain, resonating in the firmament
With crystal clarity to the lost radioactive people:
You gotta walk that lonesome valley
You gotta walk it by yourself
Nobody else can walk it for you
You gotta walk it by yourself.