Time Will Spend Us Published in The Poet’s Haven Digest Anthology, Strange Land and in The Blue Nib Literary Magazine, December 2018 poetry Time will spend us Like sands infinitely tiny and forever Scooped up, held sweaty in fist Blowing, rolling, grinding down ever towards the earth, the sea the forgetful waves
Time will spend us Like decrepit fingers clutching at the clay Slumbering, waking, roots shooting forth Green swaths sparkle, over harvested, logged, dwindling when viewed from satellites from planes from drones
Time will spend us Like vivid colors drifting, swirling in our oceans Spilling forth from stomachs of animals Who nurture, who speak, who remember where to give birth where to gather where to die
Time will spend us Like drinking water unprotected from Corporations who are people they say With invisible chemicals, with wicked greed, with bottom lines to protect in court in print in commercials
Time will spend us Like amnesiacs who named flowers weeds Confused religion for facts Forgetting our history, forgetting our past, forgetting science is about correcting flaws about admitting mistakes about human discovery
Time will spend us Like pits of waste reeking of run off and protein consumption and ballooning populations Pumped full of steroids, antibiotics for masses Saturated with antidepressants, alcohol, and frenzied calendars wondering what to eat wondering where to seek relief wondering about moderate to severe illness
Time will spend us Like we spent it, in fear, in corrupt blindness, in thick denial That Proxima Centauri or any other remote star holds our truth Another earth to be raped, to be pillaged, to be ruined in ignorance in exchange for entertainment in a bargain for convenience
Time will spend us and the earth will devour us, exhaust us, and reduce us to our smallest parts cosmic dust shifting about mingling with background radiation until democracy is a memory, until cooperation is an afterthought until we are weak until we are broken until our stories are forgotten until science is story until the enlightenment is myth until myth is truth until no one even recalls quarks and leptons until the carbon cycle is ridiculed as lies until the air dancing and skimming across the land is magic until we are at the mercy of ourselves once more until we concede to men who ordain and declare until we are undoubting that we are the center of the universe until we are digging up ancient architecture, battling each other, raising walls, and amassing weapons.