Basics
We sold our place, needed the cash to eat.
We were lucky on the street, a family
with a large tent under a remote bridge took us in.
They had been doing well with a business
they had built over years, had a beautiful home
with a pool, a dog and two cars.
It was explained to them if they took in a partner,
they would be alright with the government,
taxes, regulations, but if not…. well.
We lost our retirement savings in the crash,
when they trashed social security,
we sold the condo, easy sale, the rich were richer.
We thought we could get by for a while,
get a cheap place, eat basics, but they took
the equity, called it a selling fee.
Now every evening we sit around a campfire,
talk of the good years, tell stories of the Republic,
pretend that perhaps a revolution will come.
The news is the military hunting down insurgents.
The homeless are feared to be radicals, are put in camps.
Oligarchs control the money, the jobs, everything.
The two daughters miss soccer and basketball,
even their school uniforms, whenever I scavenge now
I try to bring them back a new book, that didn’t burn.
Coming
His wife rushed in looking like she couldn’t breathe.
They’re coming, the man at the gate told me.
They call ahead so he is not an issue. We have an hour.
He printed out all the poems and put them in a box,
buried them in the woods behind the condo,
gave his wife the key and a scribbled map.
When they come, they’ll take the laptop,
so, I deleted and scrubbed the best I could.
Don’t lock the door, they’ll just beat it down.
Tell the grandchildren I was just trying to be me.
It wasn’t meant to be disrespectful or unpatriotic,
and that I love them.
If I return and things ever get back to normal,
we’ll dig them up, be careful who we share them with.
and burn the ones about the camps and the purge.
If I don’t come back, and no one has yet,
you know I have loved you as much as it is possible to love,
and never meant to ruin your life with my words.
The Abyss
There is no eternal, closest is the cosmos,
continuing to push and grow into any finite.
Revelation begins with a cry for retribution,
the fourth seal is the rider of death
followed closely, immediately by Hades,
the nightmare of the first three,
the savagery of man slaughtering man.
The seal that follows speaks of natural disaster,
fires, misery to all they touch - California
knows this inferno, the purgatory of nothing left,
the death of the apocalypse.
Siberia lost 55 million acres, Australia’s
hellfire took 61,000 koalas.
The planet was the hottest it’s been
and immediately broke its own record.
It is not eternal damnation that should be feared.
It is the abyss of the present, unleashed
by the heat burning our homes, boiling our oceans,
the grand denier of these truths,
his cult hugging the flag and party sycophants
sacrificing the future, sucking on power,
searching for spine amid their state’s ruins.
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