A generation or so later.

I live on a mixed diet of caffeine and water,
and I don't know if I oughta add anything else,
vapour don't fill the gut up,
food's rough, don't taste like much.
I'm eating through paper and ply just to satisfy,
learning how to starve to survive.

have you encountered loneliness?
you may feel lucky to be left out
but you've left out the experience,
never let it out, no resistance to remember
existence is existential
and loneliness is a part of the whole.
Only, a part alone.

Words are like a salve, or an ointment,
they can be medicinal but are often simply aqua,
they cover and relieve in the moment they are applied,
but are soon absorbed and rarely retained,
I remember them,
But I still feel dry
and sore.

Perhaps, we thought, a solution to temperance,
permanence of these words,
scratched in leather, dried as ink,
a byte in a hard drive, a drop from a cloud.
But these are as easily forgotten,
And the relevance recedes in repetition.

How easily we all forgot,
The lessons we learnt from those who came before.
A generation suffers to teach the next,
But the world has changed, the lessons no longer apply.
The words that convinced the first,
to hate and to kill and to justify that,
in blaming others,
we no longer listen to them.

But instead those words transcend
No longer in long books we agree to revile,
But short moments lost in a storm of opinion,
say it enough times and it becomes the truth,
only truth is always subjective,
and often the subject is skewed,
mired and satired,
joked and spoke,
so often now that no-one listens.

So tired of the arguments that they refuse to listen to what is being said.
The cries of the weak and poor are lost and excused as knowing no better.
Why listen to someone who knows so little that they cannot listen?
A circle of blame that damages and blinds all but those stirring the pot.

We assume so often now,
assume those that don't fall in our line of thinking,
are simply seeing their own truths, so blind, blinking mad
maddening that others cannot see the truth that we speak,
in mantras, in madness, in memoriam.

How easily we all forgot,
The lessons we learnt from those who came before.
A generation suffers to teach the next,
But the world has changed, the lessons no longer apply.
The words that convinced the first,
to hate and to kill and to justify that,
in blaming others,
we no longer listen to them.