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I wrote this, and have since fiddled around with it, about a week or two ago. I finally decided to just put it up here. It's meant to have an uneven meter, and to run into itself here and there. It was provoked by my thoughts on politics, in general, and more specifically on the involvement (or lack thereof) of us twenty-somethings today.

When Pandora Plays DJ

When letting Pandora play DJ from her fabled music box,
It's surprising how little pop culture is heard
Among the mix of articulated sound,
And of musically accompanied verb.
It comes in candy-colored waves of light,
But, of its own, it utters not a word.
The world is too much pent up of late,
The amp is plugged into the fray
Whose susurrations overwhelm the yell
Of those with anything different to say.
But no, it's not your pretty speeches
That reach across the lines,
Falling soft somewhere in the aisle;
It's not what your protectorate teaches,
Ever armed with an air-brushed grin of guile,
That tells you the truth in what it defines.
Much easier its ready sound bytes
In its science of ready, aim, denial;
That is, if it's still worth reading between the lines.

The soothsayers at their polling booths
Are slayers of the generation's eternal youths.
Who'd have thought the dreams of yore,
Immortalized for the sake of what has failed before,
Could render so many complaints?
The mystics cry while the prophets die
A martyrdom that is no longer reserved just for saints.
Yes, you've heard those charming words
From the ones who call you dear or child:
That you can be what it is you wish most to be,
We who thought a spoonful of sugar
Would make the medicine go down more mild.
Yet the Real World's not as cold as they make it,
And life is only made of as many hard knocks
As it ever was.
The future, though, now blinds us while we fake it,
And though the expert panels
Still hold their expert talks,
All it serves to remind us
Is how much clearer speaks our age's silence
Than the clamor dubbed into it does.

Play on, play on-
The music that will have us dance-
Be it for a midnight masquerade,
Or for a thousandth chance.
We raise our voices to still our hearts,
We flood our minds with the modern arts;
And in this dapper disarray,
In all the words we speak and say,
Our movements writhe and twist, they crawl, they jerk
In some phantom recollection
Of what has since become pale, denuded intention,
Of things hoped for, things shared, dreams aloud we've dared
Or work.

See,
In our youth, a frozen state, an age of
Technospheric grace cryogenically preserved,
With no death required, albeit it thusly served,
It is the coldest blood that we have hired
To do the job of the uninspired,
Outsourced at the temperature of noontide light-
Some idle score at ninety-eight Degrees Fahrenheit.