Animals, Landscapes, Us

Be surprised at nothing. Brittle white and collapsing coral reefs. Monarch butterfly swarms whittled down to butterfly quartets. Reduced birdsong. Emaciated bears. People bent over desks day and night, growing more and more unhealthy. Neighborhoods poisoned by the burning of medical waste. Children’s asthma spiking there. Landscapes of dumb lawns, monochromatic. You may see a defunct satellite tumbling at you from the heavens. Snuff films made publicly by the police. All is faltering, wavering. Glowing coals and debris are plowed into the lake. Children stalk the hallways of vast schools in military vests as if in a snake venom fever dream. Carcasses of hogs are left to rot in the river, poisoning the people, the river animals. There is no end to it. It exceeds all science fiction novels, all science-fiction films combined and all that will ever be written. It was launched by an idea and the idea calls itself the economy and the economy is not you. To the economy, we are like great and graceful Russian bears reduced to performing idiot circus tricks for coins. The economy is not you or me. It is a cluster of numbers spinning, wavering, flickering like a Fourth of July sparkler that singes the fingers and then burns through the body. The economy is a hovering cluster of malice and bottomless want. Strange new creatures are born out of the waste of discarded tires. We make enemies of our fellow Earth species. Driving roads cut through forests and mountains, we sense the animals’ fear of us and their hatred of us. Eyes watching from the hills and then going out. A black fin slices the water as we walk along the polluted industrial wharf. Glimpsed briefly and then gone. Grass grows high behind the nuclear reactor and the noise of insects reaches endolymph-crushing levels and then retreats. Rabbits amass late night on the baseball diamond. What could they be doing? You approach, only to see them scatter in all directions like tossed gravel. Such strangeness not seen before. There are no owls in this neighborhood, are there? I mean, there never were before, were there?