Dear Young People
I slouched in pensive sulk before the screen
set on what’s now blithely called the page
called home where my grandkids clown
for the camera, that was, of course, a phone
that knows everything and probably listens,
though from long habit I still say camera,
like I still say dial, knowing better but shrug off
corrections whose interruptions intend
to sabotage discussion, like news pundits
deflect while smirking into the camera,
and since I’d just read a third op-ed
for this month in the Washington Post
blaming “boomers,” of which I’m technically
(an imprecise word meaning precision) not,
having been born during the forty’s war
as opposed to its promiscuous aftermath,
for wrecking the planet and career prospects
for Generations XYZ due to our (or my?)
DNA-hardwired stereotyping against a slough
of acronymic victims, every initial of whom
I must pause to ponder due to a mind
grooved to plodding critical thinking
that due to a capability to accommodate
extended syntax has sacrificed the ability
to trust righteousness, my first pensivity
was “Well, fuck you and your little dog, too.”
But then Miss Moore’s line “I too, dislike it”
popped up in my foggy old-guy fugue,
how in a glimpse I once caught of her
revolving out through the Algonquin’s doors
in her red cloak and Paul Revere hat
I saw she was sporting a Nixon button,
and having grown up around those old fart
Republicans and Presbyterians of the 70s
and 80s (that is in the 1800s of suchlike)
I guessed she’d have no use for the lean
and haggard free-form look of my tribe
who cadenced confessional plights and gripes
outside her boxes of tallied syllables,
that she would’ve presumed with a glance
like a cold blow of perfect contempt
that a half-poet, or no poet at all,
was presuming to approach, stammering
admiration for her exquisitely precise
eye for pangolins and so on; and so, no,
something genuine in it meant to reach
across our coeval lives stayed unsaid, and yet,
across a chasm of an actual page of paper,
she told me once that though all of us
are naked in innocence and guilt, with courage
to live within our certain deaths
we can by surrendering win. If nothing changes,
nothing changes. I do love these kids,
that mug at me across our crossing ages.
set on what’s now blithely called the page
called home where my grandkids clown
for the camera, that was, of course, a phone
that knows everything and probably listens,
though from long habit I still say camera,
like I still say dial, knowing better but shrug off
corrections whose interruptions intend
to sabotage discussion, like news pundits
deflect while smirking into the camera,
and since I’d just read a third op-ed
for this month in the Washington Post
blaming “boomers,” of which I’m technically
(an imprecise word meaning precision) not,
having been born during the forty’s war
as opposed to its promiscuous aftermath,
for wrecking the planet and career prospects
for Generations XYZ due to our (or my?)
DNA-hardwired stereotyping against a slough
of acronymic victims, every initial of whom
I must pause to ponder due to a mind
grooved to plodding critical thinking
that due to a capability to accommodate
extended syntax has sacrificed the ability
to trust righteousness, my first pensivity
was “Well, fuck you and your little dog, too.”
But then Miss Moore’s line “I too, dislike it”
popped up in my foggy old-guy fugue,
how in a glimpse I once caught of her
revolving out through the Algonquin’s doors
in her red cloak and Paul Revere hat
I saw she was sporting a Nixon button,
and having grown up around those old fart
Republicans and Presbyterians of the 70s
and 80s (that is in the 1800s of suchlike)
I guessed she’d have no use for the lean
and haggard free-form look of my tribe
who cadenced confessional plights and gripes
outside her boxes of tallied syllables,
that she would’ve presumed with a glance
like a cold blow of perfect contempt
that a half-poet, or no poet at all,
was presuming to approach, stammering
admiration for her exquisitely precise
eye for pangolins and so on; and so, no,
something genuine in it meant to reach
across our coeval lives stayed unsaid, and yet,
across a chasm of an actual page of paper,
she told me once that though all of us
are naked in innocence and guilt, with courage
to live within our certain deaths
we can by surrendering win. If nothing changes,
nothing changes. I do love these kids,
that mug at me across our crossing ages.
