Tsunami’s Surplus Sutra
We’re rebuilding after the flood like we always do
but people aren’t special anymore
We are masses
and most of us are surplus
unique, like everybody else
statistics, not tragedies
notes, not melodies
in demographic symphonies
someone’s got us pegged
They work us in their factories
work us in their offices
sell us things to keep us working
broadcast in our homes
herd us through the mall corrals
put us out to pasture
buried under short-cut cemetery lawn
Talking monkeys
Earth’s greatest magic act turned into a housing tract
Cram us into round holes
for lack of opportunities
and buy some ointment for your
poor sore pegs of jagged genetic defection
paid off your student loans or
too busy paying the prozac piper?
Overpopulated
a moldy mammalian epidemic
food for the next thirty generations of germs
aptitude test said: worm’s meat for the skull orchard
influenza, smallpox, one step ahead, two steps, four steps, eight
malevolent mitosis, cancer, the revenge of synthetic matter
We think we’re hot shit with technology
nothing can stop us, we’ll disappear into the silicon dimension
as soon as we get the infrastructure up, as soon as we pay off the national debt
as soon as we get our guys in office, as soon as we get our shit together
it’s a new year’s resolution, resolve to make one next year
Cheap Life
the product of the 20th century
Cheap Bullets for Cheap Life
Industrial Munitions, Zyklon B
cheap food, cheap gas, cheap labour
Live out low cost life in economy class
slave to the flux of the marketplace
in a closet apartment, dying out the paradigm
dying out with the old college drop-out try
dying in debt, trying and dying while the water dries up
Abort the struggle with anesthetic death
reach for the pills or the pistol
cause those poor folks on the coast had no warning
but you do, and who needs the chills of the heat death?
America voted to do another line
keep the binge going, a second term is fine!
Make an amazon donation to the starving hordes
and eat popcorn to disaster porn
Me unique, you unique, like everybody else
like ashflakes of nuclear winter, dental records
fossilized under black glass
And I think that death is in the tide
but one day the culling will be done
and the herd back in balance
or spaced out in space colonies, no thanks to me
fat grub, eating facts of life for breakfast
shitting them out as rich cream filling
recycling my waste for efficient malnutrition
and unwilling to be the first of gaia’s raid victims
let the brown drown, the hordes who couldn’t find higher ground
the hut-people on the other side of the planet, damnit
let them bear the brunt of the purge like they always do
they’re used to catastrophe, they can take it
thick-skinned holy mass of messiahs, god bless em!
No, don’t look at me! I’m weak, I admit it, happily
I don’t make a good martyr, I’m a product
of the new line of genes, the next model, haven’t you seen?
They’re CK genes and they’re all the rage now
my genetic specs support vast sensation at the cost of
delicate nerves, they’re destined for the
microchip mothership we’ll escape this planet with some millennium.
But that’s several steps in evolution away, sucks for me
my cloned ancestors of better breeding get to reap the benefits
and nuance continues to squirm, divide, split hairs deep inside
the wrinkles of my folded-upon-itself cerebral cortex
nuance to prop up hypocrisy
to justify racism
to cultivate cynicism
metaphysical egotism
to disconnect –
me from reality, declare myself a solipsistic being of an abstract plurality
Viruses mutating
natural intelligence
casually bandied-about apocalypse
like a sci-fi premise
a rusty eschatology
shallow sutra
string-bean poetry
all washed up on wreck beach, tsunami-surplus
Ф