What Anarchy Sounds Like

“Get your ass up on the stage now, gotta rage until you die.
— from the lyric “Lovely Generation” by Cole DeGenova


Anarchy sounds like anger rhymed

with disappointment.  Young poets don’t write gentle

blue wildflowers, glorious orange sunset.

They don’t have that quiet vocabulary.

This lovely generation wears their words

inked into their skin — black and blue

and red rage; Buddhist symbols

and Gandhi quotes; and leafy ferns

that spread from tailbone, up spine

and over shoulders.  They pierce

tender nipples, soft glans – holes

in sensitivity, pain as pleasure,

the irony of this era.

Buried trauma free-versed

on their arms and perfect alabaster legs.

The creed of greed is a lost prayer.  Jobless they

have no dreams to defer. Lied-to they

trust their last texts of imagination.  Pained they

split the differences of parents to sing a new song,

to live in rain forests.  We’ve lost

the flowers in our hair

somewhere along the road of years, we’ve lost

our children.

Anarchy sounds like the click-click of

Refresh! Refresh! Refresh!

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