Herds of cattle, herds of cats
// I talked to a teacher about my poems today and she told kwi how much she likes the sarcasm and sting in some of my poetry; I explained that it shows up in my poems because I'm really good at it and I'm not allowed to do it anywhere else. We complained for a while about how high school competitions only give prizes to poets who are very "high school" (read: unsophisticated) and that got kwi in a good mood after a recent travesty in my little world of writing competitions. She told kwi I ought to submit to the lit mag, but I didn't want any of my special camp poems going into something so very, very "high school," so, I wrote another poem that's a little more "current," and I tried to get myself in the same sort of mood I was in to write the other poems, and I think it worked.
Ocean Quakes
So here's the proof that a miniature apocalypse
can't knock the world straight off its axis
and the plunging of a semi-continent underwater isn't nearly as gory
as those science fiction thrillers said it would be.
It might explain the transparency of belief when it's all over TV
-that's my reason for radios, a sound pressed into your ears
when all those pictures are safely sunken in their glass screens.
I used to let the red green blue lights get to me, then I saw a movie
and they don't mean what they used to mean.
It's the same technique:
all about the cinematography, focus the camera on
death, going live in 5
4 3 2 and we've won everything. The sad stories
are too predictable because, in the midst of tragedy, grief becomes unoriginal,
so we tell another story about the surviving tourists, safe at home,
families and bodies intact.
You could say it's handy how reunited couples and million dollar donations
keep us from collapsing in an onslaught of pain owned by a land
you couldn't name, and you might be able to find on a map with three guesses,
but Oscar nominees with glittering eyes don't seem to have that moral quandary.
No, reality is a drowning morality,
no right to joy when half the world stinks of corpses,
no right to suffer when its aches overreach yours tenfold,
and you know the dollars you drop into a glass container
are thimbles to bail out a planet
that will flood again anyway when we microwave those big bad glaciers
if we don't nuke ourselves to the sky in the process.
But even I plunk in my change, if only to shed dead weight
in hopes of floating to the surface.
Ocean Quakes
So here's the proof that a miniature apocalypse
can't knock the world straight off its axis
and the plunging of a semi-continent underwater isn't nearly as gory
as those science fiction thrillers said it would be.
It might explain the transparency of belief when it's all over TV
-that's my reason for radios, a sound pressed into your ears
when all those pictures are safely sunken in their glass screens.
I used to let the red green blue lights get to me, then I saw a movie
and they don't mean what they used to mean.
It's the same technique:
all about the cinematography, focus the camera on
death, going live in 5
4 3 2 and we've won everything. The sad stories
are too predictable because, in the midst of tragedy, grief becomes unoriginal,
so we tell another story about the surviving tourists, safe at home,
families and bodies intact.
You could say it's handy how reunited couples and million dollar donations
keep us from collapsing in an onslaught of pain owned by a land
you couldn't name, and you might be able to find on a map with three guesses,
but Oscar nominees with glittering eyes don't seem to have that moral quandary.
No, reality is a drowning morality,
no right to joy when half the world stinks of corpses,
no right to suffer when its aches overreach yours tenfold,
and you know the dollars you drop into a glass container
are thimbles to bail out a planet
that will flood again anyway when we microwave those big bad glaciers
if we don't nuke ourselves to the sky in the process.
But even I plunk in my change, if only to shed dead weight
in hopes of floating to the surface.