On the Late Great Postmodern

On the late great postmodern


(Being an epic tale in which the hippie Rip VW
goes to sleep on the beach and wakes up in 2005)

Brought up in an infinite country of light
my eyes were my hands fondling
the undulating curve of summers I sped through
whose days were rich in lust, bare chested,
hot as sin. As eye catching as the cotton
shorts of girls whose bodies smelled of vanilla
over melting ice. By the side of the ocean
I lay down to sleep with the sand as pillow,
the sun for a clock for what boy born was not born
to wrest from himself the truth of his nature
unfolding out of the myth of his dreams
where the metaphors of discovery float
in the light before him he has only to reach out
to touch falling out of the mind of God,
as unlike man as man is to Him.

Of the names that are holy, that write themselves
in my unfinished book are San Diego, La Jolla,
Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco,
and all points between where a surf board can float
or the Pacific Ocean anoint what better place
from which to begin? How is it then, by what means
did I get here? To an age of distraction. A time
of blatant deceits. The deceptive usurpation
of causes to make ulterior ends meet where the poor
go hungry and the dead are expected to bury themselves.
A time that believes only what it wants to hear
as if born from the chaos of its own exhaustion
come derivative second hand prophets of commercialism
with ash can visions and acrylic religions suckled
on the fetish of Postmodernism.

Let the Postmodern confess its sins for its milk
has soured as have our dispositions and everywhere
we look migraines of mischief riot forth like infestations
proclaiming the Postmodern has failed to deliver
on what it promised. In the sputter of its devious flight
it became both a serpent and clown of wounds
saying one thing and doing another until the present
came down with a bad case of heartburn caused by fruit cake
delusions wrapped in bohemian rags of millennial visions
leading us along the apocalyptic road a long way toward doomed.
Of the late great Postmodern what can be said?
Its obituary is already written. Trying to escape the mistakes
of the past it committed every damned one of them.


Scott Malby

Posted over on Angel Fire