Fire Air Earth Water
Agile of old; now olden fragile: limb prickles: heat rash ob-
scene, abashing nooks n crannies ~ sickles from wrists-&
Neck to his fanny’s sashes’ itchy, red-misery’s histamines.
Alas, compared to the devastation down South — third,
fourth, fifth ‘once-in-500-years’ flooding ‘event’ over a
Mere decade? Drowning, contamination, toxic blocks
Hundreds of miles square you canoe? The Arctic melts;
Death Valley smelts — just past: hottest July in history
Of recorded Earth. She cries out for a personal injury
Attorney. She plots her own vigilante revenge, ripping
Back at d’midges with torrents prodigious. Hurricanes
In Spain? Typhoons every moon, Alaska to Cameroon?
Boat to my door — I’d rather be yore or nor! What of
The aether: Mercury speck roiling all over? I’ll fly with
Birds of a feather south to Antarctica! Caw, caw. Caw.
As a youth, didn’t he migrate to his favorite town, wherein
He escaped said hated heat down there? His love to fare
With cool north, whipping up gratitude and invention
Aerodynamic? But copper haze a-horizon glints glim
Of a casket. A burial of his times, as climate change
All the rhymes. Some depressive types are such that
It doesn’t take much t’lull ’em sad to bad to suicide
Rad. All yr sprite action heroes flit about to rescue
The planet; his ilk, over, out – if God crost, damnèd.
“I had a love affair with Mother Earth when she was
Brisk and young. Rafter, I’m hung up on that rafter at
80-some for the death of her.” R dead in bed, ℞ stung.
MJM 9/17 SF