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Marla Apr 2019
Sparks of light
Emerge from the void
And encircle themselves
Around a phosphorescent nucleus.

Colors, green and purple,
Shine through the hues of watery darkness
As the traces and trails
Glow vibrantly in the black of it all.

Organisms and antimatter
Flow around each other
Indiscriminately,
Suggesting a relationship of unity.

O to touch such forbidden beauty!
To hold it in my pale hands-
It's enough to make one cry
Tears of radiation
In a sea full of death's water.
Possum living Oct 2018
To one, a noxious ****, but to her the building block of civilization.

Her children would starve before trying another.

Eradicated by heedless consumption.

Their future is uncertain, but we can help them along.

One patch at a time.
Erik Whalen Oct 2018
Through a torn visage, I see the flame
One torch, by day, reflects ages hence
That spark, they say, can't be to blame
But many, still, keeps shoulders tense.

Man, sincerely, calls for homeland
But flame to mirror rends reflection bent
When man, in jest, sets sparks to woodland
The forest, torn, its visage now rent.
Thera Lance Sep 2018
Black is too much light
On a starry night.

He’s the one who lurks
Just on top of the street lamp’s light,
Above gazes that look up at cloudless skies and crescent moons.

Once, black was the comforting underside of a child’s blanket,
The closed-eyed darkness before dreams,
The glorious shadow of the day’s new moon.

Now, he spreads out of his bounds
Pulled out by the sprawl of the eternal lamp light.
And in the place of starlight,
Only darkness rules the night.
And here's a tribute to the effects of light pollution
Six times life has trembled,
At the passing of apocalypse.

Each time,
Three causes were possible:

Heaven,

Hell,

And Earth.

From heaven, asteroids could fall,
And throw up curtains on the world,
Or passing waves of cosmic fire
Would strip away the clouds.

From hell, the waters of Styx
Might slip through terrestrial cracks,
Then rise as gas,
To heat the world as sheets of floating glass.

Between the two:
Animals themselves
Could mediate the flow
Of Earthly poisons.

Of the three apocalypses
Born on Earth,
Their horsemen are:
The progenitors of atmosphere:
Primordial Cyanophyta,
Then Archeopteris, first of the trees,
And inventor of the root,
And last:
Humanity ourselves,
The apes who play with fire.

Apocalypse number one was caused
When Cyanophyta -
Named for the blue-green colour
Possessed by these bacterial worms -
Learned to inhale the Sun.

They breathed in photons,
Filtered through a heavy atmosphere,
And exhaled an ocean of oxygen,
That filled the skies with ******.

Then the world was a canvas painted
With a single simple transformation:
The land – which then was only iron –
Was touched, naked
By the breath of blue snakes
And so the wide metallic continent of Ur,
Was racked from coast to coast
With rust.

The world’s iron skin absorbed oxygen like cream;
So that, when the global epithelium
Could take no more,
The new air rose,
And thinned the heights,
And all the gathered warmth of centuries
Escaped into the stars.

Then – an interlude of flame –
Comets fell on reddened ice,
And the planet’s molten core restored
The stratospheric glass,
And the world was hot once more.

Next, Archeopteris:
First of the trees,
As plant life rose to giants,
The primal soil of Gondwana
Was infiltrated
By the evolution of the root.

As vascular limbs drilled down to earth,
They plundered minerals,
From which these new goliaths
Grew fronds,
And then, upon the giants’ deaths,
Their carcasses were ill received
By little lives
Who could not hold their salt.

Then came the chaos of holy war:
Heaven rained and hell spilled up,
And so passed end times three and four,
Up to the kaleidoscope of teeth and claws
That was the age of dinosaurs.

Now the fifth apocalypse
Was Chicxulub:
A worldstorm in a meteor,
So named for baby birds
And the sound of Armageddon:
Xulub!
A knight in igneous armour,
Who killed the dragons of Pangaea.

Now, to the sixth.
As yet far less fatal than the rest,
But the first apocalypse
With eyes and ears,
Who sees the fire its engines breath,
And to its own destructiveness attests.

We began in the trees,
And once the planes were cleared of predators
By mighty Chicxulub,
We moved out onto the grass,
Stood up and freed our hands,
And learned to play with fire.

With it we loosed the energy
In roasted meat,
And poured the new-found resource
Into intellect,
Then wielding sapience,
We humans spread:
The first global superpredator,
We preyed on adults of apex species,
Tamed the world,
Then dreamt of gods
Who placed us at its helm.

We noticed then,
The manifold atomic dots
On the cosmic dice that cast us;
And stuttered in shock.

Our dreams of stewardship
Were dashed on revelations,
That we are the chaos
In the inherent synchrony of dust.

Refusing all potentials
That mirror the errors of our youth,
We let the title ‘sentinel’
Drift from loosened fingertips,
Any now by morbid self-assertion,
We mark ourselves:
The selfish sixth apocalypse.
nihiliti Jun 2018
clear as the empty sky
and deeper than the soul of mankind
all
the.
way..
down...

fathoming further than soundwaves
reach their molecular-minuscule hands
into the bluest abyss
below
so far below

but nothing grows
not in holy-bleached waters
baptized in plasma extracted
from our darkest hearts
invisible ink
leaving writing in the sand

walls between
underwater things and we
kings of the continent
shattered like
so much broken glass
ground and tumbled into
beads for our children to
choke on

drowning in empty seas
reaching, never believing
it could happen to us
burning acid dreams
diluted to seem
clear as can be
but we still can't see

the water we drink stinks...

rotten fish/rotten flesh
polluted streams/polluted seas
waste/wasted


death death death
drown drown
down


going.
going...

g (d) o n e --

undone by recycled demon-dreams
money for destroying everything
profit on the apocolypse
prophetically pathetic


(we deserve to drink these sins 'til we drop into the nothing we created)
We bleed our ignorance clearly.
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