Naked human bodies
Draped over the glittering seashore
Smooth and supple
Vulnerable and innocent

Have you seen them?
They look like another race
Or another era
Rubenesque and shameless,
What happened to our nakedness?

We’ve devoured the planet.
A parasite in a 3-piece suit
Homeostatic inertia
Prevents quick changes
Even when the sky is falling

Together we are virtually unable to act
In the absence of
The smell
Of certain palpable death

This must be how the dinosaurs felt
So large and slow to move.

We are a biofilm
One part linked to 6 billion others
Moving in unison, guided by ancestral instincts

So self-righteous and smart
Distinctly aware of being separate
We play the part of separatists
But none of us holds the strings.

We’ve all done the same things
And had the same ideas.
We paved the world over
To make smooth roads to roll on
In doing so, hastened our work
And our demise
By sucking resources faster

We came to this land just 300 years ago
To find a place to be free.
We didn’t need anything else.

And what did we do with it?
We divvied up the land and
We set up a game where you could trade
A paperclip for a house
As long as you worked harder
And faster
Than your neighbor
And smiled when you bumped into people

But everyone played the game.
Eagerly, too eagerly.
And our frantic exhalations filled the sky
With smoke and poison gases
And our massive steaming piles of feces
Got buried with our giant claws
And we peed into our lakes, our rivers, and our oceans
Until our toxic urine fell like rain
Stinging our eyes
But we kept grabbing.
Because that was the game.

And we didn’t know what else to do
So the President said to work harder
And buy more things
And move faster
Because we all know it hurts to change
And he’ll be dead before the Parasite
Runs out of food.

We all thought we had a hundred years
Before the party was over.
But the lights went out
Her parents came home,
And they yelled at us to leave.

And now we can’t make any more babies
Because they’ll do just what we have done
So we deserted the cities
And left them to the rich.
We put a wall around each one and let them
Bury themselves in their own trash.

Then we started over
And we limited the size of our colony
And we limited the size of each person’s wallet
Because money is power
And power corrupts
Corruption is greed
And greed is a deadly sin

And we enjoyed our nakedness together
And the beauty of life and death,
And celebrated the heroes that passed on their love of freedom
And not their hoards of Monopoly money

And we stopped killing everything around us with bleach
And sprays
And we accepted that a human might get sick
And we accepted that we might die
Because that’s what happens on earth.
Even though they told us we had a right to live.

_______________________________________________

I sterilized my cat.
I felt bad about, but everyone told me it was the right thing to do.
Otherwise, cats could take over the city
Eat all the mice, then the garbage,
Then get sick and spread diseases that kill people.

Well, guess what folks?
We are those cats.
We are already spreading poisons and diseases that are killing people.
We are not innocent.
Each one of us that has chased the American Nightmare
Has collected faster than the waste we trusted others to manage
And killed thousands of people and animals
In pursuit of our parent’s
Mutated dreams for an easier life.

Ahh, the easy life:
The comfortable life.
A life without pain.
A squeaky clean bug-free body
Inside and out
Draped in expensive fabrics and jewels
High on a lonely mountain of man-made treasures
Away from hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes
And general Acts of God

And we thought we would be happy.
And we thought we would be safe.