When the Axis of Your Planet Shifts

When the axis of your planet shifts,
When a catastrophe levels your life;
Will the cerebral soft porn of poetry
And the intellectual self-gratification
That it provides cease to be relevant?

When you have to roll up your sleeves,
When you have to fight to survive,
When chapbooks are burned to keep warm,
When power is measured by guns and ammo,
When the written word is disparaged
As weak, or worse yet, as "evil,"
Will love be jettisoned as well?
Will life become nasty, brutish and short
As you battle to simply endure it?

Or will poetry remain your link to humanity?
The oral tradition that binds a tribe together,
The totem of your aspirations,
The glimmering light of revelation
That will lead you again toward
The better angel of your being.
When the axis of your planet shifts,
Will poetry become a superfluous luxury
Or the path to your salvation?

Written After Viewing Another Evening of Armageddon on the History Channel

We’re adrift upon a frail craft on a flat earth,

Listening to the thundering roar of cataracts

That cascade over the rim into a fearful void.

Tis said that a dragon lurks there to feast upon

Crews of ships that plummet over the edge.

We need to cast our grapples toward the stars

Before we turn in a frenzy of madness

Like caged rats to lunge and claw at our neighbors,

But we’re powerless, as our ship

Drifts perilously closer to the rim.

We’re attempting to balance barefoot

On a razorblade edge of disaster,

Fearfully peering up at the rumbling volcano

That intimidates us with its imminent threat

Of engulfing us in fiery immolation.

Mired in impotent frustration,

Insanely groveling to blood-crazed visions

Even our best minds snap under the stress.

Goaded by his God of Chaos, a rooftop sniper

Has a pregnant Mary squarely in his sight.

We’re standing vigil at a death-watch

In a lunatic asylum’s intensive-care unit.

Labored breathing- - -erratic heartbeat- - -

Our life-line monitor is Cable Network News.

We listen, like lemmings, for the siren that signals

The start of our mad dash to outdistance our doom.

We’ve divined our fate from the entrails of vapor

That coil across the sky their message

Of irrevocable nuclear devastation..

Fields of mushroom flowers bloom over our cities.

Swarms of angry missiles sting the shuddering flanks

Of a frightened, fire-scorched earth

That quakes in convulsions of pain.

Splattered upon what few walls still remain

Are only enigmatic figures, shadows of life

That have been extinguished in a fury of fission.

New York- -Moscow- -Beijing- - -obliterated.

“Look on your works, ye mighty, and despair!”

But wait!  From beneath the ash and radioactive soil

From which man once coaxed his gardens,

A loathsome creature wriggles its way out of the death

To face the eerie loneliness of the radium green night.

What evolutionary process does this monster herald?

What cruel gods will it choose to fashion in its own image?

Will this foul beast reign in a world any more brutal

Than the end-times conjured forth by power-mad men?

     *    *    *    *   *   *   *

Cruel Devourer, let me post this poem

On our front door like a mark of Passover crimson,

That my family might be spared the horrors

Of this looming holocaust of annihilation.