These Days


What great turbulance hovers overhead
That we cannot match the changing colours
Of the sinister light paler than dread
In the shaded dark eyes of the youngsters.

These eyes look and see a veil of gladness
Concealing by a weave of conventions,
The fullsome energy of a madness
In the manner of style combinations.

The style submits to a new discipline
Of blacks and whites mixing in rebellion.
Never yet has anger looked so pristine.
Even with odds at one in a million,

Stardom has its sullen glamour and craft.
It is there in the late evening's empire,
Where the good and the bad go to, and draft 
Their best laid plans to set the world on fire.

The fire is lit looking inside a glass
As the bubbles rise up to the surface
To burn in the minds of the ruling class,
By the merry maidens matching a pace.

And the maidens would wear nothing if not
The sartorial brilliance of deception.
Heads turn at the same speed as their fox trot
Bears youth to its logical conclusion.

This memory is beamed as waves wobble
To blend the movement on a marble screen.
Filled with thoughts without words, the minds hobble
As speechlessly vandals shatter the spleen.

The ambulances hail their shrill sirens
For the cast of thousands in their own plays,
In their own ways heroes and Lord Byron's
Improbable theses seem truer these days. 

Roma, 3 3 2008