There is nothing so modern
as ambition,
     the stream-lined-ness of it,
     its upward motion,
the way it plows under
all that lies behind its tracks.

I can not blame the 20th Century
     for its relentless progress,
     its awkward locomotive grace,
     its sense of nostalgia
in the face of a force
that has become inevitable
for its incessant forward sweep.

A century whose flotsam becomes
     the uncalculated cost of its wreckage
     the odd sharp angles and shadow
     of experiments once-grand
cast down, bull-dozed, deconstructed
reconstituted in a new spirituality of images
that float like ephemera
     over its wake, it is obtuse
behavior shaping a pattern of see, want, buy.