What will Millennial poetry be known for in the future?: A Poem?
As I was thinking about what Millennial poetry will be known for, the following is what transpired, and I’m only halfway certain about what it all means. Keep reading and leave a comment to discuss!
Millennials have been through… a lot. We were raised pretending to like mullets and midriffs, only to have to pretend to like them again in middle age, and we have no clue whether we’re supposed to wear skinny jeans or baggy jeans or the uncomfortable ones in between, but based on decades of experience we know in our bones (literally) which is more versatile and more practical to wear during a spring rainstorm and winter months when we need to wear boots and either way will feel self-conscious when wearing them because we were taught that our bodies (especially women’s bodies) should only be prodded and improved with everything from sparkly lotion that smells saccharine and rotten to under-the-table collagen injections to celery soup diets, though we were also raised playing in concrete parks outlined in rusty, pointy metal objects and suspicious dirt and uneven trees, so we’re tough enough to handle ourselves no matter our exteriors or if we can breathe, or so we want to believe, because at the same time we also know what a softer life indoors with technology is all about, as well as what that technology was really supposed to be made for: games and exploration and talking with our IRL friends in chatrooms, which we didn’t take for granted because getting on the internet powered by a dialup modem was a coordinated effort that required patience and endurance and negotiating skills in our households which typically only had one communal computer in the corner of the living room anyway, which also meant we knew the limits of privacy and how to conduct hardcore research at the IRL library if we wanted to pass our classes even though we were open to learning what the wilds of the internet could teach us, back before corporations commoditized everything, including us and our data and our time, until we got bored or physically restless and had better things to do IRL outside, somewhere, anywhere, we had to get out and do things that didn’t happen on a screen, but at the mall or the local meetup spot that was also likely covered in concrete or dirt and glass and was still serving as our childhood-adolescent playground, all while enduring pagers and flip phones that cost a fortune and still made it impossible to connect to— we didn’t know what we were trying to connect to really, just knew when it wasn’t happening— until smartphones came onto the scene and also cost a fortune with their limited apps that never worked, especially the social media apps that we tried to enjoy for a little while on our smartphones because we knew we were supposed to, but it was hard to enjoy them because cell service was always poor wherever the fun and action was IRL and so was basic app design and so were our camera phones and most of the apps were for working people with devices named after fruit so we didn’t really care about any of it, not really, though we really tried to because peer pressure and marketing pressure and the day we were forced to care about it all and take it more seriously with more serious, professional email addresses and usernames for corporate employers who we were convinced for a short time actually cared about our development because, well there were always so many personal development reports and meetings and incomplete but supposedly important data about our performance we had to focus on and improve and improve and improve because according to the data there was and always will be room for improvement, indefinitely, but room for growth was different somehow and there was never room to grow up or out, figuratively and professionally speaking, not literally, which some of us sure did, grow out more than up, because of all the sugary drinks we became addicted to across our lifespans because marketing and commoditization and cancerous secrets, you know the drill, which we should have learned more about when we were much younger and trying to squeeze into those shrinking jeans and tops, even though we were also raised to believe that hard work and determination and a five to six figure education that we were supposed to have paid off making $7 an hour at the chain shop near our school by graduation because that’s what our ancestors did and they said it was easy and that we were lazy if it didn’t all work for us too and that maybe we were drinking too many sugary drinks from the coffee shop that we couldn’t afford that were also eerily similar to the ones they got us addicted to when we were younger—well, somehow all of that, the hard work and determination, was supposed to mean something in the world, or so we were told over and over and over again, though we weren’t sure to whom or for what it was supposed to mean something, especially not now because we were and are too distracted, which could be from all the attention-deficit and anxiety medication we’ve been pumped with for decades for a healthy buck, along with the sugar and plastic and cancerous screens and pollution, remembering that it was all supposed to lead to prosperity at some point, if we only kept our eyes on the prize, though the prize we have our eyes on keeps being moved, still, and we’re already half-way dead, which probably started happening after The Great Recession hit, after all the bad things that happened leading up to and after 9-11, and after that when the housing market collapsed into oblivion, forever, though they keep telling us it’s coming back soon, though we don’t know for whom or when exactly, with all the unhoused, wandering adults out there trying to make it seem like they are the ones choosing insta-glam lifestyles in a van or tiny home without land, or was it during all the invasions and call-to-arms that No Child Left Behind heard for years alongside reciting the pledge of allegiance and grunge music and addictive pop and post-ballad rock, or whatever tunes we were into at the time, and while reading and studying controversial books and being too poor to buy books at the book fair and learning that slavery was bad while watching movies and shows that made us want to be more inclusive and honorable and live by creeks or fight vampires or demons, all while finding true love full of passion and heart, which was impossible because we had, have, so many personal development reports and expense reports due for items we were sold that we never wanted to buy, like all the pharmaceuticals and improvement elixirs and screens, so many screens now, until it was far too late for our self-esteem, and it seems like there is no escape because everything is now coming due, including our lives, which have been sold to the highest bidder of no-equity-trust and we all know without a doubt by now who the vampires really are, and that they’re real… so at least there’s that, I guess, in the end, at least we had less book bans and weren’t worried about bots overtaking our lives for a short time when it was only theoretical entertainment that wasn’t alive, but can we rely on our bootstraps and our books and our past critical thinking and stream of consciousness prose and meter and erasure poetry to save us now, from the explosion and implosion of everything, for the future into the future? I sure hope so.
What are your thoughts on this topic? What do you think Millennial poetry will be known for in the future? Leave a comment to join this dialogue, and don’t forget to share this post with others so they can join this dialogue too.
© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.
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