Too many humans
Destructive ways that won't change
We'll be extinct soon

he held up a dead coyote
like he had just won first prize
smiling from ear to ear
a look of pride in his eyes

the caption said "predator control"
which brought a question to my mind
if we call survival being a predator
then what do we call our kind?

The world is losing
Gravity,
But no one can escape,
We're hurtling on our petrie dish
In a gel that seals our fate;
Gravitating
Towards black holes;
They're closer than you think.

In China
There's a wall of dust,
Seen clear from outer space;
Our living waters die
In a legacy of disgrace.
We're citizens
Wearing masks;
We should hide our faces,
But we're running daily tasks.
We're fossils burning
Fossil fuels
Found in cremation gas.

The amphibians
Are on the fringe;
Whales can't sound,
They run aground.
It's an environmental slaughter.

Our world has lost
Some gravity.
We need to plant our feet,
But  charnel fires
And greenhouse gas
Have hastened our retreat.
Migrating birds lose sense of time,
Confused by the lights.
The mourning dove coos at night,
The nightingale at dawn;
We're like
New turtles muddling,
Under lost starlight.
We must grasp
The gravity
Of burning
Burning  light.

It's all slipping through me again
Remind me why I exist
We trawl the seas like fingers
Remind me
God pushed his hands through the earth
And shaped us out of blood
I saw it
I saw it all
We turned the sea
And it pattered for half a century
Crackling like pig flesh
Did we burn it?
Peel it back
Come on, peel it back!
What are you, scared?
What are you?

And the very last, the endling,
Caged in the sunlight at Beaumaris Zoo,
Tired of the poking and the prodding
Paced out of existence into history,
Into emblem and icon
Legend and label,
On to things protected by copyright,
Footage and fable,
And the internet's electric jungle,
And into that great white emptiness
Of extinction,
That giant ship which we are building,
Stacking and storing,
Fitting and filling,
Recording into the grand voyage
Of oblivion.

I think we buried him here.
No, no. Don’t dig him up.
Sometimes when it rains the earth opens up and blood pours out.
It’s like flesh, you know?
It’s getting harder to breathe so the pores have to open wider every fall
and more and more blood rises.
The other day the electricity in the city died.
No, not just the lines.
It was like a pulse.
Every electronic device failed
and suddenly we all saw ourselves reflected in our screens;
cellphones, televisions, laptops.
Everyone was so scared.
I remember a child gripping his knees.
Mum, mum, he repeated, but she didn’t reply.
I listened for a minute
and did nothing.
Hey, cheer up.
Some say at the end of every year, all the dead skin we’d shed to that point forms back into itself.
Living, breathing beings indistinguishable from their hosts.
No one knows if they remember their pasts,
if they are born as blank slates or prefigured individuals
destined to repeat the same mistakes,
over, and over, and over.
One day they’ll take over the city and we’ll be out of jobs.
They’ll forget everything we spoke of today and drill deep into the earth.
The flesh will split so cruelly it won’t ever knit back together again,
and blackened blood will carry skyscrapers into the earth.
Don’t be sad. It’s inevitable.
Think of it as returning to the womb.
A pure
unending
nothing.

Enough
Strength in the weakness
That has always pained the body of people
Man hues and cries and yet
Wo
to the woe inside our hearts
Take everything and burn it
And shall we not be ashamed
Of course the party is just the vanguard for
Humanities last defeat
The foe is ourselves
And let the last dead person call "I win!"

None

I have given up

on America

ever having been

a place

an emplacement

or even on ideas

being worth

publicly defending

There is only

my old cretinous

certainties

life and extinction.