I have seen corruption's empire
through the grey cold light
of morning. I have seen madness
trickle through the cracks
of minds that once illuminated worlds
with their brilliance. I have seen heartbreak
under puddled lights of city
street corners, false promises pouring
as tears from white-hot stars,
hurricanes of deplorable regrets.

Still, I am not old –
my generation has lost its youth.
Our elders, once wise,
desperately escape their maturity
through scalpels, through futile
creams and cures and pills;
any means necessary. We wish
to remain preserved, to elude insuperable death
as still life, a dusty cracking
jar on a shelf amid the cobwebs
and forsaken memories of the cellars
of our childhood purity.
Through evasion of nature, those plasticine
beauties proclaim themselves cleansed.

And us – we see our lives
in the death of the world.
Will we lift a hand
against our thinning odds?
We are apathetic,
or else we are ignorant.
We are no different.
We will not strike the drums
to declare a lucid rebellion.
In that would lie hope for our fading future –
but courage has disappeared into television
and fast-food wastelands, into videogames
and materialism; independent thought
is imprisoned within society's narcissistic
quest for wealth and recognition.

The contemporary bible:
all that matters is victory;
sacrifice your freedom
so that we may call ourselves free,
sanctimonious. The rich control
minds, bodies, souls – and does anyone
stop for a moment in this inane rat-race
and think, 'it is not forever;
we will not take our false
golden compensations beyond our demise'?
Does anyone step forward to break the reign
of this regime of affluent power-hungry jesters
to realize we are wasting our fleeting days,
which no operation could ever retrieve?

"So," asks the surgeon, trademark grin
plastered across trademark sycophantic face,
"is it time? My knife is the fountain of youth
for which, your entire life, you have searched.
Will you sacrifice your children
to emerge with younger skin?"

Vehement agreement.
It is signed in green pen,
embellished with a flourish:
the world will die, slowly,
while we forever pursue the youth
we lost long before our birth.