Millennium Coming

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

-Socrates 


I'm going to keep it 100
but you've got to be willing
to jump into the way-back machine.

You need to see your gnarly roots
teased upside down like a baobab tree
digging upwards into the ozone.
Was there wisdom there?

As if! You don't remember
pants that were supposed
to parachute you safely
towards that righteous future.

Re-branded slackers landed in flannels
at that first taste of reality,
quickly swapping out radical for tubular

irrigation for boxed lawns 
in front of those ticky-tacky
houses that generations before disdained

so you could yell
at ancient eyed children
to get off of it.

Oh bae can't you see
these words were totes never about you
until you decided they were.


Song Choice: Kids from Bye Bye Birdie

This poem was created for the prompt offered at Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads: Dorogoy Droogs, Come Clockwork the Orange, where Bjorn challenges us to work in some slang into our poems.

Notes from the Real World: Nothing makes me roll my eyes faster than complaints about the kids today. I'll admit, I have to stifle a chuckle sometimes when I see a young adult sporting a mustache Dick Dastardly would admire, but since I spent my teen years gleefully seeking out clothing that looked like highlighters threw up all over them, I have no room to talk. Every generation has their own way of dressing, speaking, and being. And the generations that came before them will ever clutch their pearls and forget their own wild (and oftentimes silly) youth.