It is the time of the coward.
It is the age of the liar.
And greed, and avarice, and lost boys
and a dopamine hit and fractals
And velocity and velocity and velocity and
go go go don’t stop
don’t stop to realize the indecency,
the disloyalty, the dishonor, the discreditability, the parsimony,
the hoards hoarded behind the gates the gatekeepers keep.
This is the dawn of masculine energy.
Not the energy your father taught you,
about measuring twice and cutting once,
about picking yourself up,
and how the sting of hydrogen peroxide
means it’s working.

Or your grandfather,
who spent the days you spent smoking weed behind a 7-11 serving on a torpedo boat
waiting for the sharks,
who never failed to stop to lend a hand to those in need
or say grace before dinner
or to help you with your math homework
or teach you not to wear a necktie at a lathe.

This is the year of cutting once and never measuring,
pencil in the blueprints with whatever comes out,
it’s faster that way.
The season of hypocrites and not of confidence
but confidence men, the masculine energy of the con,
the scam, the bamboozle, the fraud.
The pulling of the rug and the begging of the question.

Now is the killing hour,
the clock hands float over the blood in the streets
and the rage
and the rage
and the uncorked hatred overflows,
the minutes of impotence expanding, overflowing, fizzling.
Deception gives way to more deception.
Not a single promise is kept.

Rapaciousness and rape and abandonment
and the cutting of corners and KPIs,
a newborn died in a baby box in Italy
because the alarm sensor didn’t work.

It is an honorless time. A time of only one question:
not how or may or can or if or whether but when.
How soon.
No legacy, no history, no reputation.
Build the factories then abandon them. The soil keeps the memory.
And the burn scars and the floodwaters and the clear windshields
where the splatters of bug guts used to be and
the images in the twenty year old magazines still in the rack
in the guest bathrooms never used
that showed how children used to go sledding
and maybe the house is too big, no one comes by.

I shoveled the neighbor’s walk in the snow
and salted it so he didn’t slip on the ice
and could receive his mail; he’s an old man,
one of the few Black men left living in this neighborhood that was theirs once.
He sent me a letter, it went all the way to Richmond to come to my door.

He’s the last man with dignity.
In the letter he told me he has a new toy,
a laptop which makes him happy because
he is a big lover of history
and he can go online and read about it.
And I weep for this last dignified man
who proudly wears a cap honoring his service
because this is the era of synthesis and generation and revision and
content content content
and inverifiability and manipulation.
This is the pseudocene.

I bought a bottle of wine from a centuries old vineyard
destroyed in a devastating flood,
an unsellable bottle on the retail market,
a fundraiser souvenir.
I kept it as a memento mori of our changing world,
a mud-covered reminder
of how we all must work
little by little
to give the world forward.
It broke when I tried to move it home
on my seventy-second flight of the year.
It is the decade of hypocrisy
even for those who can see hypocrisy.

They made me a Vice President and
with every title change I move farther from God,
a God I never believed in;
I was raised in New England towns named for biblical places
by people who thought working the rocky soil brought them closer to God.
The only holy men left are those in the fields.
Bozrah and Lebanon and Gilead and Hebron.
The people who named those towns committed a genocide to name them.
And four hundred years later, in their namesakes, the same.
It is the epoch of cadaverine.

It is the night of bonfires and Feuersprüche,
the twilight of stories that dared and poems and albums
and I tried to sell a book and
I learned that there’s only interest in a book when you put yourself into it to be consumed,
words are calories measured in the amount of heat they give a flame.

I walked over the Westminster Bridge one night with a journalist
who told me that they can’t publish two good stories at a time
because if one goes viral it punishes the other,
the arcane footfalls of the algorithm dance.

It is the sunset of craft and skills handed down and heritage,
the waxing of a crass and pandering moon,
of pantomime, a frictionless night,
a night where nothing dared, nothing gained.
A night of shutters and locks.
These are dark ages, ages of embarrassing the future.
There is a shame here that penance cannot satisfy.
The sturdy, empty shelves;
the blue hyperlinks to nowhere.
And a generation lost must be lost because profit cannot be taken from an idea.

I think of the mimeograph machines
stuck under the floorboards of the Solidarność houses
and the punks and the whores who copied radical zines
in public library Xerox machines
and the Yugoslavian Galaksija
and the novels now considered some of the greatest of all time
once banned for obscenity.

In Ceaușescu’s house the original TV remains,
the revolutionaries didn’t bother to steal it
because there were only 30 minutes of broadcast TV each day.
In the crepuscular light birds dare to sing
even though they know the cats hunt below.
In Vilnius there is a tile in a square,
they say if you make a wish and spin around it three times
your wish will come true.
At this tile a human chain formed
and spanned three countries
and they sang.
At Ħaġar Qim on the right day the morning light
filters in over the lonesome island of Filfla
and fills in a hole drilled in the sandstone
five thousand years ago, and has done so unfailingly
over the millennia that have seen countless empires
rise and fall. And the solstice of
retribution will come again.