The Anachronism Poem by John a'Beckett

Captain Cook, wig in the wind, a shrill black zip
belting back to the Pacific, bare-back astride a horse
quick-living down the frequent freeway rain
has fleeced of mega-trucks; he gives the road sign
Wrong Way Turn Back a flick-fleeting look again
and knows fast-forward history enacted can just
like the devil wind perform a faster still back-flip.

Is he the karaoke customer, Cook-look-aliking clone
of retro-active rock stardom, Nostalgia’s hologram
back-flashing, cracking time-charts up to the brink
of a rock history that quit, flit the blast, out-ran its
bolt-shot and burst into body-babbling horospam
a retro hemispheric where everyone on the planet’s
navigating ocean’s web and’s living on the phone?

Or some enthusiastic client of life therapy ten sensed
feeling the pressure of our tropic of success, a failure
alleviating stress by dressing, getting back to basics
on a long weekend, discovering a Self-Australia
only to be busted by the Fast-lane feds out where
the aging process has not only been arrested but
bang-slammed into cyber-space and given sentence?

No, just Cook his naked self, contemporary cartographer
charting the stress-line, coastal panics on his prism
wind into which our fleeting future washes us caste-off;
blows all our currencies into this vast anachronism.