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Mar 2016
I see your star
you left it
burning for me
so that the dark end
of the street glows
like a broken candle
in the window
there is
no paper lantern lighthouse
above these grease proof paper rocks
so we watch
as shabbily folded galaxies burn
echoing the path of virtual pencil tips
tracing the factory cumulus
corroding our senses
a production line of carbon
across no man's sky
no woman's neither
for we do not own
the open wound of a petroleum aurora
drawn across this
life
canvas
candle wax
atmospheric balance
sevety eight nitrogen
nineteen oxygen
nought point nine argon
tracing nought point one
dripping
neglect
It is a gross domestic heartbeat
pulsing
a rain of elementary particles
pouring
into the veins
of an unnatural landscape

What reply can these resources make?
The dead metal
veins through stone
crack like bones
under drill bits
stolen
from the groaning ground
subsumed by grinding derricks
the sounds
******
black-gold-blood
from her veins
the sounds
unchanged
a squinting look
telling stories
but in no language we know
OF COURSE
we do not recognise
the wail of an angry child
in tantrum tornados
a crying coriolis deflecting
intention
from the eye
watching calmly
as those concrete scabs
deny air to our lungs
uprooted
ecosystems make room
not for trees
for high rise imprisonment
sea levels rising
they come
to wash mother clean
and where are we?
All we ever might have been
a blackhole
sunhalo
cigaretteburnt
on a broken candle windowsill
empty
where no one waits
For this distant beacon
has turned its face
from us
towards a lonely moon
now red with shame
we are welcome home
we are
I know
for here on this empty sill
a fragment of your still
glowing embers
lies
in the ashtray I stole
from the pub
the night we met
such tangible self interest
makes meaningful
what I say
what I do
though I cannot stop
the angry wail
of a child born
in this anthropocentric chaos
of well seeming form
can I simplify the message more?

We are not special

we owe the earth
our vigilance
not our scorn

If not us then who
will take personal responsibility
for soothing
our mother

before
the sun turns
to blackness
before
we are consumed
in our own hunger
doomed
to the decline we choose
which will it be
the decline of life
OR
the decline of energy use

our species can end
or it can soar

Choose wisely

Choose now

Or

choose nothing
evermore
Written by
Peter Roads
689
   Bianca Reyes
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