It’s best to be born mid-century.
I was born in 1954, just a babe in the nuclear age.
If you come in at the beginning of a budding century,
then you have experienced the fragrant promise of a new one.
You will, however, consequently hunger to achieve that same feeling at the turn of the next,
meaning chances are good you will die with your dream unsatisfied.
On the other hand, if you are born at the end of a stale, unprofitable, and fading century,
then you live through the excitement of the birth of that fresh as a baby’s bottom new one.
Sadly though, you will perish with high likelihood of not realizing that euphoria again,
your desire to be a part of the new century once more not to be.
No, I say that if you’re born mid-century, then you will have no notion
of what it was like to move from the decaying last to the vibrant new one,
and you will probably see the next, passing away happy in having participated
in that invigorating sense of renewal.
Unless of course you live in the real world where,
besides taxes,
the inevitability of constant war and unending hatred
play a huge role coloring a century from one blessed end to the other,
and increasingly so.
I just missed seeing the mushroom clouds that hailed
the next advance in our ability to slaughter one another,
but I’ve been lucky anyway to see so many wars now,
and such brilliant advancements in best killing practices,
that quite frankly I have to say that for me, a quarter of the way into 2021,
the bloom is already most absolutely off the rose, and you know,
all the roses keep dying, and dying, and dying.
Lanning Lee 