Published February 18, 2010

I can hear the thunderous roar of the wind knocking together far off suspended beams of steel somewhere in this broken city. Their rhythm helps me concentrate as I think about the past. But I’ve got nothing to say. I could not stop what should not have been. I was supposed to be a Titan, a Hercules, an island. What happened. Another softhand in a generation of softhands, I listen to my mammoth urban wind chimes in the distance and think about before.

See back then I had wandered so far from the truth that I could no longer smell its impostors. Daily they’d dance before me like cheap, hellish, prostitutes, bloated with their venereal infections of falsity. And me in my drunken stupor—I thought them pretty. And I’d welcome them into my home. And there in the dark they’d gather round me and wantonly feast on the scant, sickly flesh of my soul.

See when I was young mine was a world in which the youth relied on substance abuse in order to really see one another. All of us—negative ions needing badly some cross-charge connection. And only when the foundations of that world, my world, began to ring and shake like tuning forks with all the nervous silence in elevators and bathrooms and throughout cityscapes where our fathers had built spaces for themselves up and away from experience, and chance, and danger, built big towers in the sky where they performed the various perversions and extensions of industry and administration which supported a fat economy soon to grow thin—only then did it dawn on them that they had also built themselves up and away from nature, from dirt and real, thinking creatures other than computers, and frighteningly far away from the bones and wisdom of their ancestors and henceforth-most-importantly, because of all that, they had built themselves up and too far away from themselves. And we, the prodigal sons and daughters of prodigal sons, either had to jump the down-slope or cut out.

Soon the tuning forks shook too violently with the no-good, lousy vibrations and then shattered and the whole thing came tumbling down right in front of us all.

Adolescents of the upper-middle class, were, surprisingly, the first demographic to go.

Shootings.

Violence.

Newsmen spoke of the “Satan Complex:” A recorded social phenomenon in which privileged youth exhibit intense emotions of guilt in reaction to the circumstances of their birth, resulting in acts of rebellion and/or anarchy.

The rest would follow shortly after.

My steel beam metronome grounds me as I recite,

We pray in ashcloth to our grandfathers:

Forgive us. We have been found lacking. We are no men. We’ve effected a long and gruesome amputation of ourselves from life, and the surgery was not clean and scarred the world you gave us. We could not build our houses with these hands, though these hands were more than adequate.

We’re fucked, see.