generational gap

They were packrats.
They were packrats who built their lives up.
They were packrats who built their lives up around musted mouldy
smudged and piled papers, forgotten Goldberg routines of lost generations
in boxes, boxes, scattered boxes adorned with pinprick light and dust motes dancing
frantically, perpetually dancing into an Orffyrean oblivion, trying to outrun the light,
to outrun the the ghosts of the days when they tried too hard,
when their parents tried too hard,
when the dust filmed over life,
grey and undiscriminating,

I am sorting through videocassettes in stickered sharpied dated boxes labeled
with what stations they are from. They had every hour mapped to span a decade
with action films and dramas, romantic comedies, and a small box labeled "not for children".
I finger the brightly colored spines of Disney films, remembering hints of their magic
when you unwrapped fairy stories to find fairy stories and
not recycled pop culture s**t, shifting paradigms, or another world view.
I no longer have anything with which to view them
and I nearly cry and feel like pulling the film out
into the light to view like slides to
perhaps piece together something of my grandmother's world

I wonder if the children of today's binary world
will find film foreign and photographs as stale and ancient as the David,
if they will require spindly fingers tracing through encrypted paths
to process the story of the universe in the stars, in their pulsing
songs resonating in perfect time signatures in their galaxies
with the planets, with electrons, with the tides, with the womb,
unable to simply look up, and will it be better, or would they need to,
I don't know. I don't know.

Reviews

[Jonathan Ballam]

I loved the sense of digging (and sorting) through lives the through generations. I really loved reading this. Some phrases that caught my eye were "musted mouldy smudged and piled papers" , "spindly fingers tracing through encrypted paths" and the initial image of the packrats building and filling up their own lives with more and more stuff.

This is a great comment on the generations and on ourselves as human beings.

[Passive~Demon]

God this poem really upset me ha but in a good way... its amazing how different generations can be in relation to how we do things, how we communicate and see things. The world changes with every year and with every new person who enters it. Its weird and frightening and sad how all that happens in the past is just a memory.
Anyway point is, I liked your poem a lot.