Metaphysics of the New Fade

In the Age of the
Artificial God Ellah,
all things are
chameleon.

It's the extent
to which you are
that determines
how you succeed.

Dylan became timeless
because he knew
what to change;
Bowie, Madonna,
these artists
changed everything
but their understanding
of music. They had
other interests,
and no true love,
made spectacles
not of their music
but of themselves.
They never went
to Newport.

John started changing
before he truly needed,
changed to fit
his audience
and maybe sometimes
his moods,
a reflection
of what he
needed to be,
until what he
became
was more
important
than the music,
so someone shot him.
All fashions must die
to live

in time.

What killed
the Protest Age
was the Protest Age.
People wonder why
Iraq is not another
Vietnam.
It's because Vietnam
was never Vietnam.
It was what it had
to be.
The Protest Age
screwed
the Protest Age.
Now we sit in wonder
at what we've done,
and don't know
what to make of it.

How about this?
In all things are
the beginnings
of all things.
When we started
fucking about
in the region of Ellah,
we started the whole
ball rolling,
and I'm talking
just last century.
Let the Greeks
worry about
the Greeks,
their Spartans
and their Athens.
We placed a displaced people
in someone else's home,
and stirred about
a cold war
that erupted
over oil.
Tell me what
America has done,
tell me what
Americans do,
tell me what the world is
when the world isn't
any different than it was
yesterday.

The New Fade abides,
it bides its time
like the chameleon,
attempting the colors
that will make everything
right.

Dylan used to makes songs,
now he makes music,
and now I couldn't tell
you what he sings.

I would like to find out.

Traveling the New Fade

Only one war
was fought over and won
for beauty's sake.

Every other has been
for the benefit of
the three great beliefs
of mankind,
and of them,
two remain,

love of country
and love of economics,

each religions
all their own.

Present concerns
seem to bestride
all three, yet
the warriors
will learn
soon enough
that they fight
not for faith
but for their
countries
and for their
economic state.

All three have bound
the course of history
to their backs.
There is no greater
argument against progress
than these, or the need
for it to fight against them.

For millennia,
people either walked,
or employed beasts
to relieve their burden,
when they weren't
echoing nature.
Some of the progress came
when there was
interest
or need
to move many,
but that was
before
three became two.

Now it's in the interests
of the many to move
in the smallest units
possible.

So much more
could be done
if the many
accepted
that the few
can work
for the many,
and the many
for the few,
and not just
one or
the other.

This can't happen
as long as we still believe.

Faith I believe in,
that's the one needful constant,
but faith misplaced
or mistaken
is the murder of civilization,
more slowly
and more quickly
than we realize
or think.

We are taught not to think.

The age I grew up in
was in one of the pockets
where this law did not apply.
People snuck in subversion,
and it was actually
the practice of the institutions.
By the next decade, it had
become our entertainment,
but in the culture,
it was once more taboo.

I hate that word,
taboo,

and the nature of
oblivion.

Oblivion
is the nature
of ignorance,
of the need for it
for things to survive
which shouldn't,
however pleasant,
however passive.

Oblivion is
the religion
of those who refuse
to see the world
as it is, and rather
as they wish it were,
so they could be right,
and not wrong,
as they don't like to be,
but are because
that's what oblivion do.

In the New Fade,
love of country
and economics
is the thing
the last remnants
of religion
fear most,
and brand
as the harbingers
of their doom.
I don't know how
it looks; I live in
America, which has only
ever known itself.
But I do know the New Fade
employs tools that lead
to destruction
to bring about change,
and that's all
that ever happens.
Talk about nature
being ravaged by man,
beyond repair?
Maybe it's ignorance speaking,
but I think nature survives.