VOICE?

I hear no voice
As I turn my ears to the crowd,
Just a silent muttering…
Sighs of discontentment in a maze of opinions.
Pale faces of placid expression
Mouthing words of shallow intention,
Eyes lost in a glaze of chat room jargon.
Where is your voice?

In a world wide connection
Comes the distraction,
Souls lost in a web of virtual backchat.
Faces masked by an illusion of user names and passwords.
Your words are safe within their cyber disguise,
The narrator cannot be traced,
He cannot be faced to account for his debate,
Where is your voice?

Lennon called for peace,
Geldof called for food to end starvation,
Bono called for money to banish poverty to extinction.
Dylan called to us all,
The angry protest singer
Who denied the label.
Joan Baez marched in anger
Hand in hand with each rebel.
Punks stood up to be counted - in zips,
The causes of youth dripping like spit from their lips.
They brandished sex pistols at authority
And were obscene with clarity.
They all had a voice!

Where is the spunk of youth?
It is twitching on keypads,
Over texted on phones,
Lost in reverberating drones and monotones
Of abbreviated conversation
With meaningless direction,
A wasted labrinth of vocabulary.
Where is your voice?

Where is the passion of protest,
The scream of discontent,
The eruption of brave intent
That gives you breath to breathe?
Where are the violent shouts of compassion
That vomits from the essence of youthful abstraction?
Where are the flag bearers of your minds?
Where is your voice?

© Tony Stringfellow 2006

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