Tsunami’s Surplus Sutra

We’re rebuilding after the flood like we always do

but people aren’t special anymore

We are masses

and most of us are surplus

unique, like everybody else

statistics, not tragedies

notes, not melodies

in demographic symphonies

someone’s got us pegged

They work us in their factories

work us in their offices

sell us things to keep us working

broadcast in our homes

herd us through the mall corrals

put us out to pasture

buried under short-cut cemetery lawn

Talking monkeys

Earth’s greatest magic act turned into a housing tract

Crammed into holes

for lack of opportunities

be sure to buy some ointment for your

poor sore pegs of jagged genetic defection

Mammalian epidemic

food for the next thirty generations of germs

aptitude test said: worm’s meat for the skull orchard

influenza, smallpox, one step ahead, two steps, four steps, eight

malevolent mitosis, cancer, the revenge of synthetic matter

We think we’re hot shit with technology

nothing can stop us, we’ll disappear into silicon

as soon as we get the infrastructure up, as soon as we pay off the national debt

as soon as we get our guys in office, as soon as we get our shit together

it’s a new year’s resolution, resolve to make one next year

Cheap Life

the product of the 20th century

Cheap Bullets for Cheap Life

Industrial Munitions, Zyklon B

cheap food, cheap gas, cheap labour

Live out low cost life in economy class

slave to the flux of the marketplace

in a closet apartment, dying out the paradigm

dying out with the old college drop-out try

dying in debt, trying and dying while the water dries up

Abort the struggle with anesthetic death

reach for the pills or the pistol

cause those poor folks on the coast had no warning

but you do, and who needs the chills of the heat death?

America voted to do another line

keep the binge going, a second term is fine!

Make an amazon donation to the starving hordes

and eat popcorn to disaster porn

Me unique, you unique, like everybody else

like ashflakes of nuclear winter, dental records fossilized

and I think that death is in the tide

but one day the culling will be done

and the herd back in balance

or spaced out in space colonies, no thanks to me

fat grub, eating facts of life for breakfast

shitting them out as rich cream filling

recycling my waste for efficient malnutrition

and unwilling to be the first of gaia’s raid victims

let the brown drown, the hordes who couldn’t find higher ground

the hut-people on the other side of the planet, damnit

let them bear the brunt of the purge like they always do

they’re used to catastrophe, they can take it

thick-skinned holy mass of messiahs, god bless 'em!

No, don’t look at me! I’m weak, I admit it, happily

I don’t make a good martyr, I’m a product

of the new line of genes, the next model, haven’t you seen?

They’re CK genes and they’re all the rage now

my genetic specs support vast sensation at the cost of

delicate nerves, they’re destined for the

microchip mothership we’ll escape this planet with some millennium.

But that’s several steps in evolution away, sucks for me

my cloned ancestors of better breeding get to reap the benefits

and nuance continues to squirm, divide, split hairs deep inside

the wrinkles of my folded-upon-itself cerebral cortex

nuance to prop up hypocrisy

 to justify racism

 to cultivate cynicism

 metaphysical egotism

 to disconnect –

me from reality, declare myself a solipsistic being of an abstract plurality

Viruses mutating

natural intelligence

casually bandied-about apocalypse

like a sci-fi premise
   a rusty eschatology

      shallow sutra

         string-bean poetry

all washed up on wreck beach, tsunami-surplus