2071: The Unthinkable Earth

Several friends and acquaintances of mine are having babies. I am 52 years old and the climate is pretty fucked up already. (Otherwise, I feel okay and I'm enjoying life in an overall sense - jazz, poetry, walks, learning, etc.) When these babies are 52 years old, the year will be 2071. Even seeing the year written in numerals like that is bracing. The numbers have an apocalyptic look to them, somehow, in this stage of the Anthropocene. I don't have the divinatory capacities to know what the world will look like for them in 2071. Right now, all I can say is that it seems unthinkable. The unthinkable Earth.

A Question

I died and rose up into the ether. I faced God and asked her about something that had been trailing me like a death hound for decades in the 21^st-century. I said, “Why did my country spend $800 billion dollars a year on weapons and soldiers and wouldn’t pay for health care for sick people or pay for housing for people without homes?” God looked at me, her eyes blazing and her long white hair billowing like the pages of one thousand Gideon Bibles and said, “I don’t know.” Then there was a pause, an afterlife pause. At that moment, a radiant raccoon came ambling by – glancing and sniffing, his head swiveling from side to side. He stopped and turned around to look at me and said, “I don’t know either. But I understand why it made you sad and why it made you angry.” Then he turned back around and resumed his ramble along the path, pausing to munch a little clover here and there.

looking, baltimore

looking for

another baltimore

or other baltimores

this one

the first one

is suffused

with ghosts