Insulation
In my insulation / after what I have called a bad year
I want nothing / or everything but nothing more
than to make soup for myself and those I love.
Somewhere someone runs out of water
and elsewhere a house burns down.
While I boil water and chop onions / in my insulation.
My grief is / undermined by these comforts
and compounders which make its cause / unreachable.
The profligate catabolysis of the A.C. unit that peeks
through the window and beyond my insulation;
the privilege to be a willing frog in its own pot
at least when compared to other game. In my insulation
I shudder to ask myself
the difference between
playing as the Titanic sinks
and fiddling while Rome burns.
Seven-horned Lamb Parody Account
It rained today when perhaps otherwise
it might have snowed; I saw
a rainbow puddled on the asphalt
mocking that rube Noah who really thought
such a thing could mean there’d be no other flood.
God’s signature forged
by that substance the cause
of the promise breaking.
Meat is murder is synecdoche
so straightforward it seems too heavy-handed,
but it really does pollute that much, and you’ve seen
the pictures. Plus elsewhere a rainforest
burns for beef’s sake; deaths now for deaths later
for death future final;
acting out in grisly pantomime
what it predicts
and precipitates.
All of us now hang from
the rafters in bathtubs with
inverted purpose, this time
praying for a trick.
So on this one point I disagree:
there’s no such thing as farce,
just tragedy
you know
is coming
permits an indulgence in gallows humor.
The Guts
Every generation imagines itself an end time
but this one comes with graphs. I dreamed the Earth
as porcelain, pulverized and kintsugied to hell
with whatever vile shit the glue factory made
from those Four Horsemen’s rides.
But now even this seems foolhardy.
Eventually I’ll have to ask myself —
if there even is a history,
even if I don’t have
the guts to smile
myself
— will history smile
on any of us
except the ecoterrorists?
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