What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Page #3

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The monsters advance

And forests collapse under their feet

Leaving indigenous cultures battered,

Homeless, soul-sick, or dead

Disrupting water and oxygen cycles

And turning soll into deserts

As tigers and salmon and tree frogs and falcons

Stumble down the path toward extinction

Their heartrending voices

Lost in the chatter of chainsaws

And the coughing insults of buildozers

And all the while the climate is changing. . .

Angry summers, insistent floods,

Belligerent blizzards

Grudging droughts and plssed-off hurricanes

with poles warming and ice shelves calving

Permafrost slumping and glaciers receding

Sea levels rising and big cities sinking

As ocean currents halt and superstorms gust,

Deserts expand and rabbits run

And locusts horde and army ants march

And mosquitoes hunt and rodents overrun

The balance undone

Leaving crops destroyed and diseases vectored

And famine and rioting and looting and war

The ocean tums acld and corals

And shellfish and planktons dissolve

The disruption of food chains,

The collapsing of ecosystems

Tonight on the Weather Channel

(commentator blathering)

Watch it now, while you can

Because oil is peaking,

with no clear replacements

Production will falter

As demand keeps increasing

And the price, which is rising now,

will just keep on rising

Imagine the impact to the global economy

To the truckers and farmers

To your neighbors

Yourself

Watch the bidding war rage

From trade floors to battlefields

Watch the Pentagon plan and the patriots act

Go look out the window

Do you feel a draft?

World population is fueled by the input of oil

We could reach 7 billion by 2013

That's billions of bodies more

Than the planet can sustain without oll

We're consuming the planet and

Poisoning the soil and the air and

The water that we all need to live

We're driving a high-speed train

To the end of life

And we're taking the rest of the planet

Trillions upon trillions of living souls

Along with us

And all of this

All of this

All of this

All of this

Is wrapped tightly inside a culture of denials and

Lles and absurdities so complex

And so powerful

That we can barely see through the smog

The monsters are screeching

At the village's edge

So huge and so horrible

That we cannot bear to look at them

And we,

Bound in a cultural straightjacket

Of our own making,

Slumber on as they draw near

Working jobs we hate

Consuming products that do not fulfill

Distracting ourselves as best we can with

Television drugs food sex and entertainments

Hoping our leaders will find some answers

Awakening, finally,

In the still hours of early morning

To the shapeless realization

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