Progress Notes

Our progress wants to travel back to our beginning

alone without us. She’s aware that she will find us

with spears and no last names.

My issue with the Anthropocene

is that I can’t get my dog to change

his drishti during his downward pose:

from snout forward

to gaze back between his hind legs.

And then there’s all this marine life we kill.

By definition, extinction is genocide

and threatened species are ethnically cleansed.

Sushi, be gone.

Empires, fall down to your knees

with your fillets and bycatches.

Because of you, my bond with seafood

and omega fat is endangered.

Unless the fish comes from a local community

whose operations are the size of my vegetable garden,

failures in the market

they serve no master.

To be vegetarian is not enough.

Grow your own shit. Be satisfied

with quitting your job. All this expansionist desire

after each discovery must be countered

with lust for the microscale,

a sexy touch of vanishing.

Let go, relax, attain calm, or migrate inward

as an Egyptian poet (who wasn’t ancient) said.

The nuclear magnetic waves will wash you clean.

Open your chest and drop it like a weapon

away from your shoulder blades.

Losses will be heavy.

Losses have been heavy.

The prophets are environmentalists, revolutionaries,

civil rights activists, radical thinkers,

and meditative beams,

they always have been.

They tried. They try again.

Bird of Paradise

And these are not lotions for the monument

since you don’t know who you are any more than I can name you.

Did God name Adam or did Adam name himself?

Useless, superfluous, fun questions,

we are leading the world in saving what we destroy,

and just recently we’ve theorized

that zebras are striped for optical illusion:

we’ve learned to see how predators see.

I want to learn how colors choose flowers,

not how we.

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