Cold Comfort Town

Was a place where careers were pipe dreams,
sold to youths by careers officers for whom the career
move du jour was to be a careers officer,
mis-selling placements on government training schemes
to youths for whom the point of them doing the scheme
was for the employer to attract the government money
for the placement-yes that is right. Youths were trained
as bait to attract money for nothing for their trainers.
Because nothing was what the trainees were going to be taught.  

Does Time Fly Faster For The Self-Important?

I can remember the analogue world,
and I know it is still out there, somewhere.
It was very slow and it consisted of
long letters hand written to friends,
time to reflect, and non-vocational classes
where folk who were more curious met together
to aspire to some physical real-time life skill.

Nowadays that world is fractured
and it hides in plain sight
whilst the internet morphs
into being the medium
which becomes it's own message,
eliminating all other sense of time
and every other media in history.

What I remember being told  most
before the internet took off in the 1990s 
was how self important every message
that anyone ever made was going to be,
now that world wastes peoples lives
whilst seeming to be endless frivolity.

It is as if mis-selling never existed
in a world where most have less to say
and we are all forced to use
the most self important means of saying it.