American Kids

The flappers and the jitterbugs

The beatniks and hippies never die.

The rockers and grungers speak nothing of the wars

Interrupting our good time

Meaningless things, wars

In which nothing happens really

But you can feel it when a war ends

And the music can continue

After World War One

The survivors of that war became the first generation

Of Americans to do it in the back of an automobile.

Perhaps it was the sex lessons they'd learned in Europe

That led to the American sexual revolution of the twenties.

(Thousands of them returned from the war with VD

after being encouraged by their moral government

to not use condoms, because,

what could be worse than contraception?)

Time passes

And face paint hair band rock and roll

Becomes the turgid flannel and corduroy of grunge

But say something about marijuana

How it sneaked itself into white American culture

Disguised as Jazz

White kids listening to Gene Croupa

The drummer of a Negro band

The first white person ever charged

With possession of pot in 1938

Devil music they called it.

Ecstatic energetic multi-cultural vibrations

Intoning fierce emotive dancing and rhythm

Shocking to puritans

Frightening to moralists who were sure

That swing signified the beginning

Of the decay of American culture:

“The family system will disappear,” they said

“Society, sapped at its very base

Will have to find new foundations,

And Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free

Will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower

Through a sunlit world¹”

Those moralists were right all along

The jitterbug craziness the ecstasy and dementia

The refer madness (the poem pauses while I

crash through the window and fall out onto the street)

In the nineties kids were cool

We were stoned beautifully and there can be

No status among the equally beautiful

All very confusing for young women of common sense

For if there is no status among young men

How is a girl supposed to know who to mate with?

Perhaps she should just sample us all and then choose

Her- mother- said- to- choose- the- very- best- one-

And-you- are- not- it

A kid today has a different bent

He's a straight edged non-drinking non-smoking ass kicker

Whose greatest vice and outpouring of spirit is his violence

And his willingness to repeatedly fall off of a skateboard

Breaking his ankles and cracking his head on a plywood ramp

He tells stories about getting kicked in the face at the metal concert

And relishes the pain of tattooing and piercing and cutting and scarring

Pain is what galvanizes his memory to the moment of life

He loves pain, and so the decadent hedonism of my generation

Has become the masochism and asceticism of his

And what can we say about the movement between the decades

The different faces, the masks of the American spirit?

Perhaps one cannot participate in the emerging incarnation

Without completely disconnecting with the past

As though an awareness of the past disqualifies us

From participating in what is new.

1The moralist is quoted from Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow