For Millennials Who Grew Up Alongside The Internet

7 poems by Dash MacIntyre about the Millennial experience

Photo by Kelsey Chance on Unsplash

[I am a Millennial, and also do all of these things.]

Live In The Moment

stop glorifying the mundanities of your life

you slave to instant gratification

you notification dope fiend

you influenced follower

you amateur paparazzi

you museless narcissist

you avatar sellout

you aesthete of lackluster

you epiphany of mediocrity

you magnificent superfluity

you do not deserve the people’s attention.

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Instagram

concupiscence strikes the affluent nympholeptics

and the pretty girls savvy at branding themselves

conquer the market with their veblen talents.

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White Flighters

…but now they wanna be cool again

so they go back to the city

but the riffraff is still there so they gotta move in slow

one neighborhood at a time the gentlemen return

gentrifying conquistadors

with faux indifference and plaid shrugs

a few at first with authentic crime rate risk

and cheap housing forgotten by the metropolitan purse

till others see it’s not so bad

charming even

and the coffee chains grasp hands

and social mathematics take over

till the area is cliché and everyone tries too hard

and getting dressed takes too long

and parties of people circus about

trying out various personalities

as they mingle conversations in their product placement lives.

---

Café Couch

I’m sitting on a comfy little sofa in a café

with a fresh cup of coffee and a book of essays

on various interesting artistic subjects I’ve never looked into

what a pleasant summer morning I’m having here in chicago

with my article for the day already done

and free time to read with no deadline helmets on my head

and yet my thoughts are bogged still in the latest climate report

and its damning and pessimistic apocalyptic predictions

with references to the fires in spain and greece and california

and really everywhere this summer

and I find it surreal like time melting desert clocks

how plugged into the doom and gloom I am

and I decide I must stoically rally myself to maybe picking just one

between whether the world is ending or I am having a lovely day. 

---

Familiarity

I can’t believe you didn’t introduce us she says

and I recall I did forget to do that

since she already knows so much about them

from observing in the social book of faces

and we talk about them all the time

but yes I remember now

they have not ever officially publicly met

so the familiarity of course could not be revealed.

---

Naive Millennial

I stood under the marble doorway

of the art museum’s modern wing

surveying attendees on their experiences of a special exhibit

of discovered underwater artifacts from egypt

and one compliant visitor

a white male sixty-five-plus some college

forty k to fifty k no kids under eighteen currently at home

insisted upon me his theories

that egyptian culture was inspired and constructed by aliens

you could tell he told me passionately

because pyramids were also built way across the ocean in the andes

and alien technology was the only logical explanation

though my survey was more interested

in whether he had been to the museum’s gift shop or the cafe.

back on topic he said he hadn’t been to the latter

but had been to the former and for the succeeding question

he had not made any purchases because he told me

in between requests for me to write his reason down

the gift shop had no alien-related gifts.

I pretended to write it down as he blamed the government

and its deep state conspiracy deniers

for the art museum’s extraterrestrial omissions

and I listened patiently before offering a calm counter-theory

that maybe multiple cultures had constructed large pyramids

not necessarily because of alien deus ex machina but because

pyramids are a rather rudimentary constructional concept

of stacking rocks up as high as you can

that children everywhere enjoy doing on their own

and it’s maybe not therefore surprising over thousands of years

that disparate empires would individually excel

at stacking their piles of rocks splendidly high

and he considered it

thought for a moment

looked me in the eyes

and called me a naive millennial.

---

The Selfie Room

the selfie room buzzes alive

as the town’s cool kids come in for the happy hour social

bringing their own photographers

but the influencers aren’t doing much drinking

cause you can’t get tipsy or sloppy

when cameras are on and everywhere

and they dip inside a ball pit of simulated nostalgia

and toss rubber ducks in a porcelain tub

and hold pillow cloud puffs in a blue walled hallway

and sit on mushroom pleated ottomans between vinyl palms

and put on masks and crowns in the mardi gras loft

and sit for motorcycle poses with a desert highway road projection

as a tray of complimentary flutes of california brut

for sipping goes around

and I man the bar serving pink nouveau rosé in glass deco goblets

as the gaggle of digital influencers exchange palaver

and trade social handles and follows for turns at blowing kisses

to politely reciprocated shutter clicks

and a girl in a sweater that says ‘champagne please’

turns me down when I offer her some

and another in a mismatch of cougar print and zebra stripes

takes two but they’re not for drinking

and she poses in several contortions pretending to enjoy the bubbly

and then gives them back

she can’t have them in consecutive photo-ops

and it saliently dawns on me

these are not my people. 🥃

If you enjoy my poetry, I have published two poetry books full of Millennial existentialism, Cabaret No Stare and Moon Goon available in print and on Kindle.

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