The climate is closing in.
You can see it in the clouds
of the Internet from dawn to dusk;
the World will soon be forsaken,
a species-depleted husk,
a cold shade of its former self
where too many people
are seen to deserve
an early final resting place
as surplus conveniences,
too high up on the shelf
and too many
for its perspicacity
over an ultimate capacity.
Single use plastic has had its day
and we're told not to use --
to keep steely at bay --
what so reamly supplied
the machines would help us to abuse;
if they stopped altogether
and made poison instead,
something neat, or on the rocks
you could quaff before taking to your bed,
things would go so much more smoothly
for we bread-and-circuses-led.
Because you and me, we hold the bag.
We hold the bag, and we are its sag.
We make the minions and join them at work,
pick all the berries, convert cows into jerk,
turn herds from inside fences onto highways replete,
vape the stack and eat the pie on the hoof from a seat...
Meat every day and throughout every week: we're sold!
Champagne seconds and thirds: like gold!
We are the problem.
This is not only words.
We tell and we are told
what is painful and stirs,
hiding in plain sight
the hurt and the anguish...
So, why, on solutions,
do we serially languish?
Money has a way --
by invisible hand --
of fishing for eyeballs
and hooking them out
of the sentient organ
humanity's become,
so that betrayal
of Our firming belief
in a smoke-free environment
(however anti-dilution pollution keen
any would hope to remake the scene)
is joining the system;
to loft up Kingdom Come
and save civilization
for all of the people
living in it, somehow,
honouring all who have ever been --
depending to the last
on an environment of the past
never again to be seen.
How must the money
cry in its sleep
when all it wants to do is serve us
from patent recipes it follows,
folding the egg white meringue
of perceptions we harangue
and plank along the precipice,
yet far below the eerie heights
where the packages first go
before filtering down,
as manna from heaven
so loftly in our sights?
So, a few of the humans patched onto the grift
look around and see lots of others it will lift.
Pollution, we hear, is too costly to simply clean up,
there's a rift and a cliff you must climb
to snatch and salute full your all-too-humble cup.
Besides, we say, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas rhymes
are the first thing to minds when prices go ballistically up into the skies,
and the second thing everyone does then is to roll their eyes
and to shudder under the cover of great heaving sighs.
Never mind the excess of executive ease
or vast real estate holdings wherever the world's at its knees
begging at the fence for a job, or a morsel
beneath the contempt of a material liberal foresail
getting its wind from union-broke outsourcereling deeds.
You might think if the job you once had is just a yarn
nothing could be easier than to return to the farmyard to tend at the barn
all of the animal angst that could please you in stopping
what instead puts those nails in the coffins our war machines are dropping
when the jails are full and three jobs bank only time away from penury's cropping.
And now Our environmental sense express is anger;
questions, "Why not homesteading with poly-amorous splendour?"
Wonders, "What worth is living multi-generational in a city with no thing around to own,
or to build up from scratch away from a virtual fold?"
So, the impossibly carbon intensive,
is a slippery slope fashioned
from the captured emissions
around thinking that makes us pensive;
seeing too many snakes and ladders above
on the financial map drawn way down below
which charts only triple threat doctorates
as able to scale or build a golden trap,
positioned to decide where a community garden,
or a disease free zone
will be allowed --
or ever be --
otherwise, to fail.
And what's an apple tree
under an apartment complex
by a cancer alley throughway
anyway?
Except for a permanent reminder
all the food you eat is forbidden fruit
to the urban sprawl,
and that one tree never picked,
couldn't feed a stackhouse hall
full of people and their pets.
Farmers feed cities
people farm feeders
cities farm people
feed, city, people, farmers.
Man down!
Cardiac arrest!
The water police have detained your heart
while the energy police have slipped
a nuclear surprise behind the berm
next to your neighbourhood's elementary school
where the apple tree was happy
until all the worms showed up having pupated
with an arse-nal of artis-anal isotopes,
and now couldn't feed any but the most egregiously
doped sufferers of radiation poisoning so soon on their way home,
or gene-adapted CRISPR babies
Monstantoed to receive their Bayer-fixed radio-nuclide stablizer today.
A ray of hope for such as this
scarred Earth machine
may be we dare at all to think
and to lay down before the end to dream
before the sucking sound drains the drink
to the spirit of the average, wholly mean.
A cop out for sure
if you care enough to live
and let live the species
which you don't eat;
and now only give
promises of a future;
ending before beginning,
a something rather thin
by its skin flint pedigree
no money will recognize
nor degree upsize
to the necessary perigee
to arch triumphant
over our meta-enemy
and lay with it down
as it renovates the Crown.
We could look up and get lased from out of the sky...
Friend, is your behaviour grim;
your environmental reflex a sham-first
social-media-expose fronting an army
of carbs, and steak-streaked mouth hole moments
covered in milf-fat cheese and duck-liver pate?
Are you refrigerated youthful and tanned to a crisp by an electric bed
inside your Hummer's Humvee house of dread?
And did someone say that this was bad,
you should be shamed by the day the rest of us had?
Probably not your positioned officials
on a double tax roll retirement-plan fantasy.
But maybe the spines of these thistles
brushed smooth with corporate grease
will slip past your jeers and your whistles,
saying no to your, 'yes', and how much to your, 'please?'
How much gristle is in your pocket no one can see?
Is the offshore accountant sure they can't locate the spree?
The corporate charter is safe if the living is free.
I'll press fast that hoary weed you'll never bleed away.
Vote Safe. Vote Fair. Vote... For ME.
Partisans blink and wonder if it's them in the frame-up
and try not to look around with slitty-eyed nerves jingle-jangled by guilt,
the wound-up neuro-elastic plastic of their brain-caged hamster wheel
letting fly a fortune of darts on release at their counterpart,
chipping sides into the round table on impact,
making it square enough to rack mount those mechanical hearts
in a mansion full of rooms only concubines use
because the humming equipment spits out coins
on the hour by the bucket full -- like art
by AI fingers suckle fully connected networks, as a muse,
for the sake of predicting its uber alles success
before climate chances to change its cruising course
because nobody thought the smokestack's caress
was causally connected to anything worse
than a thick and vicious human stain.
That there's time enough for love
tells us all there is a funny wizened old anthropomorphized version of chaos
stroking his or her -- or its -- talking cat just new out of the box,
calling it g*d's creation there underneath the dandruff
fallen as snow to a warming and distant planet
of little to no concern to anyone
living in or on it
except for the ones who once and future, always,
kiss the ground and reach for the sky
praying everyone believes in the floating stacks
of currency germane to their activated sense of consumption,
living the dream as fatted calves and stalwart defenders
of the corners they can command over survival
to sustain all the breaths this true gift of life,
burned away all of other concerns
to exhaust for just another day.
YOU ARE READING
Succulent Skin
PoetryAs an ongoing work conceived with no rigid form or rule over content, many subjects receive treatment in widely varying voices and styles. To go with a lot of the unstructured free verse, there are even a few pseudo-rap or hip-hop styled pieces, pro...
