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- 06/23/2020
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June, 2020 – Hell in a Handbasket - 3. Part Three: But Where Will We Live…
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Part Three:
But Where Will We Live…
XV.
How long the day of reckoning
Has hounded our every footfall,
While we thought the shopping easy –
And the chosen choices could stall
Payment on a bill whose interest
Would cost our kids their very all –
We went on indulging the same,
Like Times had not caused our repine,
Forked tongues saying greed was harmless,
But minds knowing the check-out time
To give Nature’s owed pound of flesh
Fast approached to pay for our crime.
So now, with the world on fire
From Siberia to Brazil;
From Patagonia to Perth;
With Dust-Bowl dryness on our sill,
We walk and complain of the heat
Knowing the worst’s yet to come still.
XVI.
An enraged Earth plays flame-tag with itself,
Saying in thunder and tossed-aside embers
From asshole humans and their lit cigarettes,
“You shall burn for this! You shall die fittingly.”
And so, fire touched upon the tinder dry,
Storms and licks and leaps over quickening winds
To decimate first the Northern Hemisphere
All through its long half-year furnace summers.
And then, this fire touched in tinder dry
Storms and licks and leaps without a pausing rest
To decimate too the Southern Hemisphere
All through its long half-year oven summers.
Temperance gone, the North Star sheds a tear in smoke,
But it’s only the orange tinge of pollution
We tell each other is “charming” at sunsets,
Knowing the brown coal-smog signals Man’s sunset.
The Southern Cross appears to drip tears of blood
From the starry crown of satellites one man’s
Allowed to link, like a fishing net of death,
To rob the dying even of a clear sky.
Therefore, an Earth enraged shuttles the planchette
Above continents, like a cruel boy using
A magnifying glass to set ants on fire –
Only the “ants” are preserves, fields and forests.
She spells out a mighty Ouija damnation,
For it will all go: Yosemite and Muir Woods;
The remnant margins of the Once-Amazon;
The well-raped and cleared teak lands of Borneo;
Siberia; Canada; Japan; China;
The Middle East; Australia; Europe; Belize;
South Asia; North America; Germany;
And every other refuge for Man will go.
The world’s empirically on fire, while we fiddle.
Time’s up. We’ve had our chance, now Nature demands
Our pieces be removed from this world’s chessboard,
Laughing flames when we cry, “But…where will we live…!”
XVII.
Damn our constant thirst for “Good News!”
If it’s good news you want
How about giant viruses
Revived from permafrost –
Each Pleistocene-sized and dormant
Thirty-five thousand years –
But now global warming melts them
And they spring back to life.
There’s some of your “Good News!”
Then there’s the Pacific Northwest
Where another headline,
For June-2020 readers,
Proclaims micro-plastic
Burned up as Asian pollution
Rains down now by the tons
To smother the Cascade Forests
To the point of their death.
There’s some of your “Good News!”
Don’t forget the Dump-heads changing
Sovereign Alaskan law
So Donny Dump Junior can shoot
All the bear cubs he wants –
OR, the Conservation Officer
Fired in Canada
For refusing to shoot bear cubs
Whose mother he’d already killed.
Had enough of your “Good News”
XVIII.
HYMN
Global Warming, God’s gift to Man –
Now one hundred thirty-five-degree days
Can force a mad migration to The North,
As a billion Indians try to breathe.
Now a hundred fifty-degree days
Can roast the poor out of the Gulf States,
While the Rich’s AC adds to the sweat.
Global Warming, Man’s gift to God –
Now locust swarms, vaster than fields of rice,
Can return Biblical Times to people
And fill up the opium-parlor churches.
Down on your knees, you hopeless feckless God;
The Dollar, Greed and Death are the truest
Trinity since we’ve gone over the brink.
Global Warming, just some Fake News –
Death and Destruction’s Art has fooled us all,
At least as it’s advertised in public,
Despite what is known in our heart of hearts.
It’s more comfortable to believe a lie
Totally unworthy of any faith,
Save the one that says “You must keep what’s yours.”
Amen.
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