To Be Dead

"[T]o admit that we’ve fallen behind, that we don’t know what anyone is talking about, that we have nothing to say about each passing blip on the screen, is to be dead." ~Karl Taro Greenfeld

On Memorial Day (this was last May),
Cotton of cottonwood trees on the breeze

Clouded the cloudless skies of green Zion.
"Time was, a poet could rely on good

And bad, as perceived by the aggrieved
Hypocrisies of local deities,

For a job. 'Sing, muse, of glorious Zeus,
Hurler of lightning, all-wise and frightening.'

Immortal Zeus is mostly dead, a ghost
Who haunts a dying tradition of lies.

Time was, a poet could rely on lies,
Lines, rhymes, and love of sensational crimes.

The madness stays immortal. The portals
No longer belong to narrative songs,

No longer to throats and ears alone. Boats
Bronzed by gore slip their inky mooring slips

In old divinities' infinitely
Deranged brains to arrive, not quite alive,

Not quite dead, on the far seas of greased screens
With news of new wars, new poets fallen

Behind in the churned mud of phosphor-burned
Anniversaries," Gone Century said.