THE PURSUIT OF CHANGE

There’s a place somewhere a year ago

Where the grass grows free from shadow.

This year punctured me pretty with uncertainty-

The year that detoxified passing

Time in front of old television sets

And women hiding their faces in public.

Through that immortal Spring

We poisoned ourselves

Digesting its rotten fruit-

The daily news.

Men in suits said: ‘no one expected this’,

And governments warped into

False-oracles and flawed prophecies.

News travelled fast,

Days passed silently,

Dominating and drowning

All but the emergency alerts,

Which became the very tick-

The frantic mechanism of inertia.

The summer sun was dusty with

A multiplicity of answers,

Unsettling public notions of liberty and leisure.

Everyone became a victim-

Hands held through plastic,

Distanced conversations transgressed,

Slipped through fingers

From metaphor to reality.

Protesters used as scapegoats-

Is this the end of America?

Now September sun draws close around us.

Post-modern students sit idle

With the new-norm:

Confined time unwinding

In one-roomed apartments between

The viaducts of breaking news stories;

Resigning ourselves to futile online Conversations with insomniac bodiless

Heads floating-

Intangible-

On computer screens.

I seem to be moving backwards-

Stability averted,

My sexuality perverted

As my decades lie inert-

Cyclic and confused.

I can’t follow my desires

All the way through

So they lie dead in my mouth.

This is the birth of a century:

The terrible germ is born,

Mocking globalised webs

And modern democracy.