In case you missed it

It's 1985, 1975's colors
have long returned to the box,
faded
and swapped for silver,

heavy as the polished air
          the singer breathes,

hinting
pain between the phrases,
the grace notes,
            the swoops,

while the squalls
of guitars ring silver
      over the landscape;


Every drum fills silence
      like the final sound
ever to sound, the past wilderness

we found there still wild,
but bound
in the gestures, the ambience,

all substitutes for the inner world,

all unstable
within its borders, shimmers and growls,
echoes and shadow;


Pay no attention to the adults

who slept
through the decade
in dreams

of beige, they
who saw no wilderness
in guitars,

once dangerous and now pretty,
 forgettable, 
            or sweaters
depicting deer never to be shot,
that they would never shoot;


It's what we wear,
patterns over patterns,
fragments of the same few lives
spread over a population,

light glinting
off the panes of darkness
that cover our eyes,

that reflects the world
we'll leave you;


Where intimacy is shared,
distributed in pictures,

the same
pictures that hold the story
     of unseen lives we all remember,

where a girl hugs her knees
into herself
and smokes a cigarette,
a boy touches a breast
for the first time,
and a girl dedicates her diary
to the tape player
that sings to her
alone,

and the Japanese
youth

have grown out their hair,
cooler than us at last.