Art 

W(h)orl’d Action

“This is a history of the present.”
Overshoot, Wim Carton and Andreas Malm

Somewhere for someone
the world ends every day

while the vulnerable (all of us) fret as
fossil fools set downward spirals

in motion and fatalist adventurism finds
a fragile world awash in crackpot notions

motion and fatalist adventurism finds
a fragile planet awash in crackpot notions

of preserving assets while capitalists,
fascists, and deluded lackeys attack until

flooded by the real ocean (happening
now) land formerly occupied by humans,

bugs,           reptiles,            mammals,

crops, and      all other           land               

  loving                                   stuff

becomes climate collapse collateral
persisting into a too late (ob)scenario

rhyming sadly with the just-in-time plan
pouring this drink of water from that plastic

bottle, delivered by a fossil fueled truck,
into the hands and dry throats of us, left

behind, thinking as usual and always
‘What the actual fuck?’ while hoping

the planned dialing back by the not possible
geoengineering time machine could succeed

as we want to believe but don’t, becoming
instead bedeviled with spirals’ uncanny

not linear          reversible          or avoidable

hysteresis          with its            stark

but falsely

reassuring connection with hysteria which sounds like
silly, spiraling, feminine worry though this is not that

but the degree to which stability defeats reduced input—this is the beetle on its back, the consumed stack of wheat, or extinct species—reminding us that what is is not easily reversed

turning itself, as it did/does, into the present
weather, roller-coastering into the Earth-sized

disaster unfolding around us in unspeakable
unsustainability— with the predicted wars

and desperate migrations, pitting the global
north against the south, as if we weren’t

all victims, we/they blame ourselves
as wrongly, rightly, partly, totally we            

gloat while the main winners of the
blame game otherwise known as

the oligarchy escape to its islands
or freeze to death on Mars, having tried

to restore it all after squeezing every last
dime from extraction while they/we fantasize

getting back to the good old Holocene
we would be in if not for our anthropic

tendency to delude ourselves for
the sake of business as usual, also

called daily life, into which we wake
up into realizing our lives must

comprise the daily changes we need
to survive at all despite that seeming 

less than likely if not entirely
off the table as deal makers used

to say when there were deals to
be made and tables at which

comfortably to sit and
this was not the last

act of whatever this is, has been,
or will become once we are gone

But, we are not puppets (we argue). We are beings awake to the  controls imposed from the outside by those with their fossil fuel death spirals and delusional fix-it later agendas. But, alas (we also gasp) acknowledging that we are the ones (but were we, are we?) who could more easily picture the end of the world than the end of capitalism, knowing now

we might get to see both,
but, and this is almost

more than we can know,
we won’t like it. And though

we are beings, we won’t
have anywhere to be or go.

We, the prosodic beings

comes from dread about the threats and crimes of the current government, along with interest in dolls, robots, puppets, and other human adjacent entities. The poem of the same name is part of a book in progress called Even Venus.

Curated by Norma Cole, this installation is being presented at Right Window, 992 Valencia St., San Francisco in April, 2025. Join us for a reading and reception on Tuesday April 22. Timing is 6-8pm, reading at 7. Cookies, wine and various waters to be served.

My book Which Walks is forthcoming from Nightboat Books on July 1 of this year. Contact me or the press for advance copies. There is contact info on this site. Comments are welcome.