sound poem

Eric:

So I made a recording for that website emma was talking about. The recording is here. It is a poem called "The Next Generation." The text of that poem is below:

We are not the next generation.
We never were.
We never will be.
We place stones on stones placed by those now living in Boca Raton
and we are building nothing.
And they were never the next generation.

There is no line,
is no progress,
no regress.

They were. They were not.
We are. We are not.
They will be. They will not be.
And this is it. This is not a cycle.
This is not order. This is not planned.
We are. We are not.

Does this depress you?
It shouldn't. So what if there is no zenith
we are aching towards?
Once I rambled with an Indian taxi driver about life and we didn't talk about the coming inauguration or the recession or the recent plane crash that left all its passengers alive; he talked about why he came to America and I talked about college and we chattered on about the nature of jobs and I honestly loved him; I was sitting in the back, but I wasn't. I was next to him. We were in a coffee shop. We were at a hookah bar. We were best friends, brothers, lovers. And I knew him and he knew me and it was all okay
because transience is freeing,
because I am making a web that will never collapse,
because I matter to him, he to me,
because we can't really connect but we try to and that is tragically beautiful,
and worth running up the hill with this stone for for infinity.

You are not the next generation.
You never were.
You never will be.
But you matter, are matter; you do see an angelic nose-pierced ticketing woman with a strand of blue hair trailing from her hat on a train and you talk to her and you make a web and the web catches everything and everything lives.