i.

Fossils fuelled by denial’s sighing torch,
a gospel of bones disturbs the broken
earth, breaking open the way a swollen
boil bursts, its burial mound birthing shards
adorned with marks of potters, flame-hearted
artists who, with patient, scorched hands, performed
quietly their monumental task of
recording old, nearly-forgotten deeds,

those taciturn priests of peace translating
apotheoses with clay and paint for
the needs of revellers celebrating
incomparable success in war games,
imitating from base to lip legends
and victories of belligerents they,
in their drunkenness, cannot name, turning
myth into deep bowls, broad vessels to hold

the breath of heroes immortalized in
song, kraters to be held in the quaking
hands of shallow hordes misinformed as to
their actual purpose, workers of verse
in earthenware not knowing the toil of
their craft would be trashed, smashed with another
generation’s disregard, tossed out hard,
trampled into evidence coughing dust

                    ii.

and gasping scratches, howls of ancestral
paupers whose magic carved the ostraca
of these coveted museum pieces
into quotidian curse tablets, spoils
condemning us post-modern tomb-robbers
who search after another manner of
exploiting what wealth we have already
exhausted, resourceful as determined

vermin, claws cluttering along clotted
iron arteries, where the only of
so many invasive species to be
spotted is the rust-scald of memory,
over the corrosive wounds of which we
rush to clog our future’s faucets with sour,
screeching choruses pouring forth filth from
sinking depressions among the depths of

which our end persists, singing of gardens,
abandoned paradises, eager to
resurface, ill-prepared and unready
to shift, to adapt to this decayed form
our way with the world has made it take on,
politics twisted as pipelines into
the molasses-blackened tentacles of
which nature completely vanishes, how

                    iii.

every moment since we exiled our
Selves from an endless beginning has been
a loud watershed warning oft-ignored
by industry’s ignorant talking heads
thickened with visions of profits, torrents
of dividends blinding them, torn between
bringing about now the total demise
of our society as we know it

or only the climate (and why not both)?
In the face of such greed green-lighting oil’s
requiem liturgy so our super-
market churches can burn without even
sacrificing the sacred convenience
of buying things for which we have no need,
yet purchase while preying upon those poor
beings guilty of nothing, no sin, but

existing before deforestation
and decimation of nations were “in,”
drones and automatons enraptured by
electricity, amazed at how its
invisible force illumines well our
devolution with an almost-halo’s
luminous haze, the only thing left to
pump is one’s fist in protest since god knows

          no planet should have to go out this way.