A Series Of Letters To Poets

To Poets Of A Millennial Cage

To us, the corruptible spawn of a vile voice once wombed with bilious rage, in our mothers bellows an eternal travail while our fathers mine soiled hearts for pennies.

Today we are vacant of souls.

Watch how we’ve become callous speed-readers of tragedies, soliloquizing in languages defeated by complacent rhetoric, spelling names of our future seeds from foreign manuals and work-rosters.

As we stand at close quarters with our shadows, in rooms hoarding memories and books gone stale with pornographic fonts, other bored youths are celebrating social grants fleeced from lumpen proles disguised as taxpayers.

Those peers who beat strange gods into boxes carried by Glen Dlamini wrecking havoc through suburbia, swore never to return to townships burning with sculpted corpses of other charred dissidents.

Many are now streaming slogans and odes on digital planes, singing praises to a fossilized civility, fifth generation prosodies lulling our nightmare at hand.

Yet, with is letter I ask if our castrated voices are forever hushed into doodles for tweaked consumers and woke patrons?

This letter is torn in plain view of cloned leaders and vaccinated parole officers warranted with tyranny against black flesh, and it is paling its lettering into broken eyes of worried pets huddled by lonely poets incarcerated.

It is blotting its final ink on lips of rehabilitated alcoholics, who are now addicts to algorithms and war archives.

What have we done, poets?

Deserve we not this repulsive disdain when we sold volumes of ancestral pain to crusader publishers and agents of showbiz puppetry of words and wits?

Fellow poets, are we not to be judged by the many marred faces staring back through tinted windows of fraudulent churches and our literary museums?

And as an exodus of our liquefied tongues is forced into pilgrimage towards rusty towns of our upbringing, locked downed with our worst family feuds and illegitimate siblings, what have we to say at this pandemic of disturbed comforts?

Would we die coldly touring our past adventures at an hour of peril?

Will we rewrite a short history of life in a millennial cage fashioned in metaphors of a cowardly retreat to servitude or, will we chisel introspective prophecies on our canvases, of distant portals from whence a new rebellion will be birthed?