We Were the Love Generation

All you need is love

- John Lennon

We were the love generation in that century

of war and atrocities our lives spent chasing our tails

from bedroom trade deals to boardgame currencies

of cultural and intellectual capital

antique mating rituals in modern undress

driven out of the cities — out of our minds, with luck,

afraid they too had been made, had, by the killing machine —

not knowing if we'd gone mad or were the few still sane

in an insane bankrupt out-of-date defunct civilization

unsure where how or if to draw lines

between fascination imagination and hallucination

or how to conceive a reality unadulterated

by such stuff as the mindsets and memes we were born into

cookie cutter refills for entry level positions

accessory to the crimes that sickened us ab ovo

Impelled by sex-crazed genes to perpetuate our kind

in a shrinking already-overpopulated world,

exercise our lunatic notions of liberty

within the maze of dead ends and vicious spirals

prescribed by nature and enlightened self-interest

refugees from free-market evolution

trying to find a way out from in under,

to get behind the sense of loss at the outset —

the skipped first beat — the zero constitutive of the sequence

but still empty — the heart's desire to overcome

the problem blind monads have communicating,

the slim chance of recognizing who or what

besides reproductions of our own alienation

(cunning configurations of puritan prohibitions)

we keep bumping into on our shortcuts toward death

War Incorporated in us: innocence lost

at an early age down on our knees hands clasped

at the back of our necks breathing in the fallout

unable not to see nightmare mutants

taking over the plutonium forever earth,

street smart before puberty about things

then still nameless to us — racism,

sexism, ecocide, genocide,

gross national products, fundamentalist

religion in bed with fundamentalist economics

ladders of knives in each others' backs legs spread

face to the wall hearts on our sleeves stars in our eyes

individualist egos on the one hand utter

schizophrenia on the other — dog eat dog

business class anarchy in a race to the bottom

Running naked from the killing fields, bombed-out dreams,

deflated passions and kindred abuses left us

by age after age of progress, one pyramid scheme

after another built on scooped-out hearts of the captured,

then crumbling in time from a waste of natural resources

looking for a place outside the solitary confinement

of an atomistic society in thrall to a mythic

autonomous maybe even eternal self,

a verdant fruitful place copacetic with the vision

looping behind our newly opened eyes:

a body politic of expanded consciousness,

an unselfish sense of self as loving, caring,

a symbiotic process and integral synergy

inhabited like our bodies and minds, flesh and blood

by multitudes of indispensible fellow travelers

Knowing as if by instinct to try to keep tight rein

on the military and constabulary, to update their orders

so they stand at temple door and civic gate

as guardian demons, occult presences

to avert war, blood sacrifice and corruption

Knowing as if by genetic compulsion to try to keep

pulpitry and bigotry far removed

from affairs of state and heart, yet believing

governments should be consecrated to our own

in-group's principles and tenets of faith

Knowing despite ourselves, in our guts and spine,

the need to counter prejudice hate injustice and greed

with beauty grace compassion and love core values

having nothing to do with theft exploitation

competition ownership or power games

Learning that diversity requires community;

that ideas are a dime a dozen only actions count;

that we seem to be not only intransitive verbs

looking for nouns but cognitive fields made up

of memory imagination will and fear

driven by genetic desire to be continued;

that every life is a cosmos every death a cosmic

loss every consciousness a communal treasury;

that what we leave behind is a smidgen of what we were

before recycling into merely binary information;

that our essential obligation is not to ourselves

but to this relationship we've let go to hell —

soil smothered waters poisoned air choked

family ties and animal spirits broken —

this mortal world this home we share with each other.