We saw the best minds of our generation destroyed.
We saw the best minds of our generation destroyed by poetry and progressive politics.
We saw our hearts torn off our sleeves and dropped in beakers and observed, ventricles pumping, chambers opening and closing off, the painful involuntary muscle straining of our shifting shapes.
We saw what it would take to become what we had hoped to become, what we had been told was to be waiting for us when we arrived.
We saw it and saw through it, past its flickering coins in the underwater sun.
We saw what progress did to us and decided inertia would better suit our temperaments, decided we could do without the false promises.
We made false promises of our own — that we would not fall into what was easy, that we would not jump through hoops for things were not really on the other side (things we did not even really want to begin with).
We found a few others who agreed with us.
We would use each other for reinforcement, rare touchstones, hydrodynamic foils in our upstream swim.
We would swim. But one by one each one of us would tire, would slow and settle, would take small measures of consolation until absorbed into the flow of progress toward conciliatory chaos.
We were ready to be lulled.