Earth Day

 
Just before being bored to death
people wonder whether creation is overrated,
life like a listless game
of pick-up basketball
played between bored millionaire basketball players
and everyone in Middle America
suddenly realizes Middle America is just a collective hallucination,
a broad black hole of nothing
burning through the conceptual center
of everything…
Happy Earth Day! cries Jesus
who bursts into the room
just as everyone finishes filing out
the door closing softly behind them.



Listening to Birdsong in the Predawn Hours

 
I hate it when I log on to social media
and die a thousand deaths
before I’ve finished my coffee. Even people
I might want to see on my screen
are buried beneath a barrage
of multinational advertising and how fucked up is it
that Dawn brand dish soap
advertises not with pictures of brilliant plates, glasses, and spoons,
but with fuzzy ducklings scrubbed
of planet-destroying oil?
In the dissolving gloom and looming new day
I think about the relativities of suffering
and die a few more times
before throwing my phone out the window
as pointless and expensive gestures
are all I’m capable of.
A storm has passed this way in the night
and the air and streets are clean
for the time being and all the trees very green.
Nothing but birds singing in deep green.
I hate it when I’m a hungover piece of shit
and life insists on being beautiful.