https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late-20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism and that marked a departure from modernism.[1][2][3] The term has also more generally been applied to the historical era following modernity and the tendencies of this era.[4]   While encompassing a wide variety of approaches, postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of scepticism, irony, or rejection toward the meta-narratives and ideologies of modernism, often calling into question various assumptions of Enlightenment rationality.[5] Consequently, common targets of postmodern critique include universalist notions of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress.[5] Postmodern thinkers frequently call attention to the contingent or socially-conditioned nature of knowledge claims and value systems, situating them as products of particular political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies.[5] Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, subjectivism, and irreverence.[5] Postmodern critical approaches gained purchase in the 1980s and 1990s, and have been adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines, including cultural studies, philosophy of science, economics, linguistics, architecture, feminist theory, and literary criticism, as well as art movements in fields such as literature and music. Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction and post-structuralism, as well as philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson, though many so-labelled thinkers have criticized the term.

I was in two minds whether this ‘exposition’ of/on postmodernism was to be written in poetry or as a prose essay. Prose allows a more diffuse, and so a clearer, exposition because there is more room and more leisure for elaborations of ideas and thoughts. A poem on the other hand carries, ought to carry, much more sway, of emotional impact; and by way of its attempt to crystallise the ‘atmosphere’, the ‘ambience’, of what it is like to live in a world which intellectually and socially is postmodernist, a poem is likely to have more of what the musicians call ‘attack’ when it is perceived by the minds of its readers. The choice for a poem was made by me because of my wish to make impact emotionally, and so, by way of crafted words, to move, if I am able to, at least some readers to reflection, engagedly with their feelings, upon these postmodern ways of life we enjoy presently everyday a little more so. This preamble then is my statement of my aims:

Postmodernist Poem

Regimes’ relations temporise, their unctuous drawls

Tough-it-out improvising using clout and brawls,

Sets fires; their law the fiat of the Kings of Babylon,

Heirlooms of Sturm und Drang harangue in hanging gardens all day long

Slapstick insistence suppurates, blancmanges reason’s precepts,

The world’s last light is a candle spent on gamesome capers:

And who is to hold tomorrow its bit stump and weigh the judgement?

Here for our flaws faith-shot our glee is to be vending wars,

Welcome new-normal as past-masters,

Brothers, a new Prometheus at his gated castle games us,

Broker of one-way firefights, views befitting no solution,

Maroons get set off daily in our thoughts; coerced forced entry

Beats headaches all day long, the thrums of desperado booms

Patterns tattoo our pinked marshmallowed brains

Recruiting fictions come, attract, as magic writings

The dressed up para-media, its demotic bandoliers,

Our fine desire seeks light and fire, their knowledge traps, and frees

Trespasses by design disposing undone youth undesignated

To swarm galore the open door, the pipers calling tunes

Pretender praetors, vendor-bursars, boastful on the highways,

Their trafficked freights, doubloons and pearl of Tartary;

Fair dooms proclaim within our brains, declare there fair intentions

Emetic thoughts, like waste disposal pulp machines

Have managed all things down to empathetic trash

Here warm stale airs homogenise and smooth to blended fug

Handcuffed to lies, apostatised, our railings against nature

Are as one-legged pigeons jigging stumps on no-man’s land,

The scavengers of service sector inspiration

No rung’s firm fixed, uncompromised, no standard’s concrete

Lit sumptuous marts suborn, assume, the concourse-concussed vote;

Gnome manufacturers snare them; as with Dr. Dee__'s dark mirror; Fake masques and shallow alchemies

Rifling peremptory passions so to seed our Saturnalias

Line dancing’s made obligatory for trifles, party snaps,

The passing paraphernalia of a thousand, thousand ships

Freighting their storied hulls; the deal’s Louisiana

Secular priests extol our feasts as graced release from prison

Berserkers having chart nor compass, forming dispensations

Draw up the circuit, scope our hopes, rope-up decision,

Harlequin carnival engineers of cloaks of many colours

Gorgeous agendas, paper plausible; praxes labyrinthine

Poleaxe all nature, seek out fabled anthropophagi

Be ye gender-free, be ye bold, consider, contemplate

Installation indeterminate chapel-lavatories

Our is the world defined against the vet’s provided rules

Ours is a world divined assigned by boilerplater ghouls

Ours is a world designed inside neo-mediaeval schools;

Their work is an end-of-line, a knock-down firesale, load of balls