de-evolution is being televised
from an old VW television ad:
If you sold your soul in the eighties
buy a piece of it back in the nineties.
Beetle legs skitter, cable tentacles quiver
over my back and up to my neck
where piloerection reigns and
VW rules.
Wow, man, what the hell happened
to my g-g-g-generation? We thought
tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming
made the enemy; We knew so much,
we thought. We didn’t. We did.
Marching in the moratorium I floated
above the tens of thousands, listening,
heard the mad cynical idealist screaming
“Charge the pigs! Charge the pigs!
They’re bombing Cambodia right now!”
Asshole with a black beret, red star.
Zapped back into the multitude I screamed
“Yeah, like getting our heads split open
is going to help the Cambodians!
Show the pigs peace!”
Maybe we would have gone further with wine
like the scarlet vintage gulped and vomited,
as blue heads roiling with answers were
flyblown in the raging wind,
the hurricane storm of the Bastille.
Come to stink of it the proletariat
were caught by the Napoleon of their nexus.
Twist a weird here,
and a li’l sybil dare,
and you learn how to ad, man,
furnished rooms for de bait.
Be careful what you fish for.
Tasty tunas of global unity bring
sharp corporate sharks of globalization,
teaching the world to synch
in perfect harmony…
it’s the reel thing.
The medium is the massage without the flesh;
the flesh is busy pushing and pulling
fucking or giving birth or laboring in fields
of manure, silicon, pharmaceuticals,
babies, daisies, slaughter houses, nightclubs,
brothels and hospitals birthing
billions and billions
of deliberate mutations.
De-evolution is being televised,
brothers and sisters,
projected on blank eyes,
goths and twisters.
Would we were wiser,
lauders and dissers.
We are what we think
and scheme and grub after,
buffaloed wings sliding down
like flaming napalm.
Time to crash,
heartburn to the max,
writing on an ash
into Bedlam.
Will we be what is left,
over-congested dung hill
of over-digested DNA wrungs?
While at the base Romans roll
a pair of dice
lost?
~ Wry Welwood,
late twentieth century,
re-edited May, 2021.