Post-?

"Your poetry's so...poetic. Sincerely, I'm impressed."

We break the molds stitch them back together to fill them up again with the same old drivel.

Didactic is a word that's been bouncing around my skull for days now. And it's the agenda I just can't get behind. But what am I?

We have this nothing, and it's nothing because I say it's nothing in spite of all your protestations otherwise (which makes you equally correct, of course). Well, we're both correct. But we can't be entirely correct because, you see, so is everyone else--correct, that is. And if I'm correct, and you're correct, and they're correct, all of them, too, then there must be some grand amalgam we can, for lack of a better word, call Correct.

But that's not right.

You see, there is no right, there is no wrong. You start with nothing and you work from there.

And this all made sense to someone (perhaps a few too many someones), and they rode on the backs of fiery Truth and told us all there is no Truth.

You will never make a difference.

It took the modern world posting itself before they came back around to the idea Zen Buddhists came up with hundreds of years ago...or something like it. Speaking strictly metaphysically, I suppose I could get behind this. But, please, will someone tell me how to live?

It does me no good to reach the end of the guidebook and find the pages being eaten by a nest of roaches. Imagine reaching the end of the Bible and there never being any mention of a New Jerusalem. Where do all the people go? It's useless.

And maybe that's the point.

And then, forty years later, people like you and me come along and are pissed at the way things have been going and want to know what's the point in proceeding any further down this path. So, we start writing. And now, we have an agenda. And we'll show them, we'll stick it to them, won't we--you and me, all the way? Won't we?

And just like always, I get distracted by the curves of your body, and you get swallowed in the deep sea blue of my eyes. And hours later, we lay exhausted, trying to figure out how all this happened. We don't care about dismantling the universe to the last speck of dust. We don't care about nihilism, absence, lack, and nothing. It's procreation we're interested in. We've gone back to our most basic instincts. We have to not just ignore, but obliterate the past. We negate the negation which has already negated itself. And even that's not enough, unfortunately.

We're post-post-post-apocalypse...or something. But isn't that playing right into their hand? I swear, it makes me want to tear my hair out. We've been painted into a corner and find it nearly impossible to make our way out.

Is this the way they must have felt when they started? When the realists rejected the romanticists (pshaw!), when the modernists pushed forward from realism and naturalism, when the postmodernists said, "Fuck all!"?

So, seriously. I know this question has been lingering in everyone's minds probably since the 70s or 80s (and poststructuralists are no answer), but where do we go from here?

Because I can't make the same mistake they did. Postmodernity wishes to escape the binds of Modernity, but then lacks the foresight to even remove modern from its name. Or maybe it was intentional. Maybe because it signifies nothing. Or everything. All. Absence. An absent parent? Maybe because in any age--past, present, or future--postmodern will always be an anachronistic word.

So, we can't go with post-postmodernism (though, certainly, the label has been applied before). But by this point, doesn't it all lose its meaning (and wasn't it supposed to have already?...of course not).

So, what, what, what the fuck are we doing? And when we wake with the morning sun, how will we live with ourselves? And who is going to show us how?