The World is Falling Down

Day Eight: Split This Rock Poetry Festival (March 20 – 23) calls poets to a greater role in public life and fosters a national network of activist poets. “The festival will explore and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change: reaching across differences, considering personal and social responsibility, asserting the right to free speech, bearing witness to the diversity and complexity of human experience through language, imagining a better world.” Soapbox Poets for Peace is issuing a NATIONAL CALL TO ACTION for Poets of conscience to come to D.C. on Wednesday, March 19th, armed only with poems of peace, witness, truth, mourning and outrage. Since I am unable to take part in these worthwhile events, I will share with you my rant poem “The World is Falling Down,” written in March 2006.

The World is Falling Down
(The Other Voices)

Alert! Call your Senator now
Donate to save ANWR
Click here
Add your name to Impeach
Delete Delete Delete
Condemned to cyberspace purgatory
Out of sight
Out of mind

Well, not quite

There is still that little
Voice that nags
Guilt guilt guilt
Quitter

If not you, then who?

Out damn spot!
Shut the fuck up.
I’ve done all I’m going to do,
All I can do

To change the world
To change minds
To change the course

It ain’t going to happen
Got that?
Nobody is listening
Nobody cares

The world is falling down

Do you get it?

Deaf and dumb
Dumb and dumber
Life begins at birth
No, life begins with conception

Life is sacred…
As long as you are white
Christian
Heterosexual
Gainfully employed

Forget the poor,
They’re just bloodsucking losers anyway

Torture prisoners?
Hey, they get what they deserve
They attacked us first
And they’re just brown-skinned
Raghead heathens
With evil in their hearts,
Thugs and killers.

The environment?
Don’t expect me to listen to
Those bleeding heart
Granola eating
Tree-huggers
I got to make a living don’t I?
Who gives a damn about an owl,
The porcupine caribou,
Or trees?

We’re talking about
God-given rights here
Our dominion over the world
Right?

Who reads petitions anyway?
Our Prez says he
Doesn’t read newspapers
Doesn’t pay attention to polls, and
Isn’t impressed by protest marchers
‘cause they’re just defeatists anyway
Worse
They’re anti-American traitors.

Anybody care?

The World is falling down

I’m leaving.


(In July 2006, we moved to our cabin in Canada)

... P. L. Morningstar
.