MONSTERS HAVE APPETITES LIKE BLACK HOLES

I’m calling out the monsters. Let’s name spades spades.

Monsters are not green or purple. Monsters have skin-colored skin: beige, ruddy, brown, olive, gold.

There are monsters of privilege and compartmentalized investment opportunities. These monsters live in gated communities or small islands. They have good health care–-what, don’t you?–-and perfect teeth & they only eat organic kibble. They wash and recycle their zip lock baggies. The drying rack’s shored up on an air conditioned counter next to a shade grown coffee bag flown a thousand miles from the grind of Reality.

The monsters of privilege are well educated. These monsters have good muscle tone. These monsters make small sacrifices & mouth holistic living. These monsters practice feng shui. These monsters are really a-scared of you & me.

And there are the monsters of assured ignorance & monsters of opportunity, serial killing mercenaries memorialized in state holidays & veterans pensions.

(venerated family members)
(sacred cow monsters)

There are monsters of convenience. They drive their SUVs down the road past peak oil & Exxon-Mobile ill. Set mind cruise speed. Prozac heart at McEase. (Material disease ain’t symptom free.)

These fuel eating monsters believe the corn crop, the sugar crop, corporate science sanctions all their pleasure whilst the lungs of the planet burn furever & evermore. Unpaid slavery labors US Grade A corn fed leisure. Ain’t no clean green for these mad cows.

And there are monsters like you & me, creeps who eat the beef of seven planets without much grief, common thiefs of the brief.

Someone smarter than us will make it all better, alright? Good night, sleep tight, we bite. Monsters have appetites like black holes.
 

UNSUSTAINABLE POINT OF VIEW

Somewhere down there, inside, back there
way in the back of your brain you got a little map
a homunculus version of the world with the oceans
and the continents and the one
with a big land and ice mass called the Antarctic
and every so often the radar of your thoughts
might pick up that this big land is a resident
of your little consciousness, your planet/ego homunculus
and this year in March the radar had a little squawk,
a little whelp, a Who in Whoville yelped when the largest
piece of material to ever fall off a continent as they
are thus configured fell, an ice shelf into our
hurricane slapped laps on the coast

And there was another squawk, but maybe it didn't alarm you
because it was just kinda like the batteries in the smoke
detector, the ones that get you every hour until the
need to DO SOMETHING permeates and stains the moment of your thought
a tipping point, something that was building, something
you hear and hear and then it becomes really CLEAR because
you're reading it LOUDER and more FREQUENTLY--
the article where the scientists came back from ocean wilds
to report crabs starfish and sea worms slooshing lifelessly on the bottoms
their conclusion:
"Yes, it's no illusion, this entire ocean gets our overdue ruling
(we're past the pacific tipping point
we're past the pacific tipping
point past the pacific tipping point)"

The largest ocean went pacifically, officially into COMA
DEAD GONE DONE no OX-ee-junn
a low
but *massive*
volume
a sussuration,
a gentle slow
bone swim home for billions of battered birds,
albatross torsos tossed with plastic stuffing...

Heaven is a water
and in the largest ocean
tuna masses flash in underwater mercury
phytoplankton nutrients, microscopic beauty--
they say no two look exactly alike--
and the krill, kaleidoscopic pollinators
of the deep green keen
whale pipe song

I remember a blurry gray day in
the long drawn funeral,
the day I walked along the beach
one smelly, silent day
and I saw my last bird
and I was too oblivious to say goodbye