Far Future Near Now

The far future approaches the near now

But we are middling, middle-time people

Hard-driven, internally combusting our anxieties

With desirous dreams that relieve the persistence of unknowing, not owning, all-owing

We all expire in sighs and coughs and turns and muttered-under-breath curses

Alveoli, tiny grapes of wrath where air and blood exchange,

Collapse when tension gets the best of them.

Then we inspire, pop and fizz, a fine aerosol to fill the reinflated space

Giving coronavirus, influenza, some new pandemic a global charts debut

When we expire next.

Money changers, lungs of the world, collapsing, re-mystifing, and cast out again

In pistons and power plants, we inspire to detonate air for ancient remains

In contained spaces bedeviling metal and enraging water

towards our energetic ends. At the other end, the

exhaust tons leave plenty of devil in their enlightened entrails, trailing entropy

Giving global heating, brain pollution, some new pandemonium

A head start.

The machinery of breakneck capitalism works at ignition, agitation, exhaustion, ongoingness.

On the timescale of respiration most worries are irrelevant

Only a mind bloom of imagination can encapsulate our algal angst

We are the pollen of consciousness, set to make earthseed in community

With desirous dreams that relive the persistence of disowning it