Tag Archives: exploitation of world resources

Parasite

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Parasite

Mankind has been no bargain. They’ve scorched the living earth,
determined to exploit it to improve their worth.
Bargaining for diamonds, drilling for fossil fuels—
with each new excavation, proving they are fools.

They release noxious gases into the atmosphere,
and with each new admonition, shift to a higher gear.
Who will console our children as they forge ahead
following our example after we are dead?

We leave them with a dying world, and who is to blame?
First, off, those politicians who see it as a game
to increase their power in spite of consequences,
building up their war toys, strengthening defenses.

Extending greedy fingers, needing ever more.
Selling off our future, profiting from war.
While the wise men warn us, who in power listens?
Too busy filling pockets with everything that glistens.

 

Prompt words today are: fossil, scorch, gas, console, example and bargain.

The Comfort of Old Men

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Photo by Jan Abellan for Unsplash. Used with permission

The Comfort of Old Men

Children are sleeping sound in their beds,
inured to the missiles launched over their heads.
They’re used to the discipline of a cruel world
where bullets are served when the flag is unfurled.

They call it allegiance their country to serve
Old men sit at tables displaying their nerve
by setting out battle plans whereby the young
provide the chests where the medals are hung

that they earn facing death so the old men can gain
more gold that the young men pay for with their pain.
They posture and pose. They salute and they brag.
They call it a privilege serving your flag,

but none of the old face the bullets and fire.
It is not the aged men marked to expire.
Their rigors of battle are all of the head.
None twist to the impact of napalm or lead,

but war’s golden rewards are amassed in their pockets.
Munitions and guns and bullets and rockets
are the fruit of their plunder and part of the fun
they will buy from the profit they make from each gun.

This generation’s blood sweat and tears
will pay for the yachts of the rich and the gears
of the factories smudging the skies with their waste.
Air chokes on their vapors, the oceans all taste

their lethal remainders and sicken and die.
We have poisoned our water, our earth and our sky.
What is left once the old men have all had their say?
They will live life in splendor and the future will pay.

Prompt words for today are inure, twist, golden, privilege and discipline.

Devastation Station

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IMG_0223 Devastation Station

Our beautiful world licks her wounds
and limps around us, twirling her skirts
to blow dry dust, then empties her wash water
in deluges that flush away even more.
Not content with the bounty she provides,
they gauge her skin and pick her scabs,
feeding her poison every day.

Rich men lauded for their tax-deductible charity, get richer
by purloining more of the earth’s bounties
that they call their own.
Super yachts and super models  
give testimony to their greatness,
obscuring lurid details
of their journeys to success.

Their trophy wives marry desolation,
then furnish it themselves ever after—
future alimony little enough reward
for the sale of life and dignity.
The social pages full of the same old story—
old men professing their virility
by photos taken with presidents and starlets.

They  reillustrate their own lives with
records of success on study walls,
like rich wallpaper obscuring scars
they’ve left around them in the world.
Hiding stories of devastation
the world keeps choosing
to reward them for.

 

 

The prompt word today was “devastation.”