Running for My Life

What if the ocean rises 20 feet

and we never feel winter again

What will we learn when too many of us die

when bank accounts mean nothing

and money falls out of our pockets

like soil crumbling

when Darwin's laws apply to us

when the biggest man takes for himself
when will and power are the real strength

when chest-beating, fierce nostril-flaring

unhinged survival

is king?

What if we lose the lost?

The lost are the only truly found

(I count myself here)

We who can't fathom the so-called

power, the bloated, balding white

men in suits, the graying

bespectacled men hiding

their flaccid cocks,

their once buoyant,

malleable balls.

Buying power like so much cheap white bread,

the cheap kind you can mash in your fingers

that curves magically into one neat ball,

one little beige nugget of no nutrition, no

sustenance, nothing.

Weakness wearing a power suit, unzip it,

unzip it my friend, unzip the limp

beige lump, watch it fall,

unglorious.

I am jealous of my cat's superior knowledge

that survivial has always been his m.o.

batter the mouse, hunt the squirrel, be on guard

and then say fuck it all,

sleep hard,

sleep like death, who cares.

But I care, me of the bigger brain,

the bigger agenda, another epic-billion-dollars

for a war we can't win, a war we will never

win, a war we started not to win

but to prove a point,

a war for a bloated, flaccid-cocked

bunch of fuckheads with oil

clogging their ears.

Oil they should boil in, oil they should drown in

while sitting in their big, fat WalMart buying

sport utility vehicles.

What will we learn.

What will we take away when all's lost and all's taken?

A slug from the wonderful drug,

another double pour next to someone

who drowns out all the noise, who buries their

fears in cigarette smoke and whiskey and drive-thru

Arby's and sad sex.

Another one bites down hard.

What if the breath in is the last, if the couple of wilted

dollars he throws down are good for nothing.

What then.

Can we know, can any of us predict the mayhem,

who of us will be worthy of Darwin's label?

How fit, how strong, how powerful

will any of us be.

Take down the bloated men in their suits,

hiding their soft, pale

bellies full

of expensive, aged beef, and

aged, luscious grapes and swallowed

secrets,

the tongue a gate to darkness,

to fall into, be eaten,

consumed in the awful machine.

I'm lost but not that lost yet.

Don't look for me.

You won't find me in the windpipe, in the esophagus,

in the oddly curved disease

of a body.

I'm not there.

I'm not there.

Running for my life, running for

your life, too, fuck it all, I sleep

like death, hard,

waiting for the slow creep of

ocean, for the melting yawn

of what's next.