OrYour Dollar Is Your Vote
Or
I Still Buy Plastic
Bring it on, he cries!
Fell the trees
Divert the rivers
Mine the ore
It’s the mercy
Of the guillotine
Sharp, but quick.
I like to sing
I like to look up
The angels are so close now
The effluent is up to my ankles
This is how I hide.
Don’t we all?
To curl up in a cozy ball
With my Internet and comfort food
Maybe Burtynsky will photograph
My body next
My face practically falls off
The front of my skull with
The weight of ignored sadness
When I’m too tired to hold up
A smile anymore.
My lament rings out
In my echo chamber
Yet my wallet still opens
For convienience
For plastics
Each dollar, a vote.
My words don’t match my actions
Until I can do that I’m part of
The problem.
Yet for all the railing against humanity
This I think is misplaced
For our nature is this. Even those who see
Are also against nature,
So what?
So what hope?
Is there any path
Save mass extinction?
Should we let the next pandemic
Do it’s job and run it’s course?
Surely she could shake us off
Even now, even when it’s worse
She’s done it before. Life is the
Reward of life
So why are we here anyway?
Can we wake up to what this
Human
Experiment is, before we foul
Our earthly Petri dish?
The best I can do is pretend
That there might be some miraculous
way to balance *all* this
And dare not remember
What lies beyond…
20220718
For the prompt at earthweal
https://earthweal.com/2022/07/18/earthweal-weekly-challenge-in-the-wake-of-progress/
erbiage 
Hard hitting and so powerful, Eric. I especially resonate with the front of the skull with the weight of ignored sadness. I feel that sadness all the time now. All I can see ahead are more and more climate crises, while politicians keep glibly side-stepping the glaring obvious, in order to stay in power. Sigh. I’m afraid my challenge has depressed us all.
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Grimm indeed, Sherry. Keeping our heads in the sand isn’t such a great answer either
Sent from my iPhone
>
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Gulp! “The weight of ignored sadness”
Keep writing. Keep reading on the street corners and on the stages of the world.
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Maybe we now observe the limits of sentience in animals still sensitized to their comfort zones — “comfort uber alley” trumps “save the world” any fucking day now. The internet is a mass distraction/convenience machine, resulting in a world perpetually out of focus except for the boobies. Your Burtynsky selfie is one of the rawest coals of honesty I’ve read recently in this burning age.
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“My words don’t match my actions. Until I can do that I’m part of the problem.”
– Recognizing the distance between words and actions is important, for the sake of building self-integrity. This is where real change begins.
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My face practically falls off
The front of my skull with
The weight of ignored sadness
When I’m too tired to hold up
A smile anymore.
This is a great image, eloquent and inventive despair! But hey we are still creating language!
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