climate change

In the blaze thirst can’t be quenched

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It was a hollow cry, for no one could ease the pain. She howled into the night, and he bellowed from the other side.
The crescent of the moon was spangled through the bare branches of the trees; winter had come too soon, that was what Blaze believed, but Willow said this was the way of things now.
Life was becoming death in an endless winter.
Blaze had asked Willow if she couldn’t try putting a more optimistic spin on things, but Willow said she lived truthfully; an optimistic spin would be a lie.

‘Are we to blame?’ Blaze had asked Willow.
Willow slumped down against the rotting trunk of a willow tree, ‘No.’ Willow said.
And Blaze could only believe her because she wouldn’t sugarcoat the truth.
‘Is it anyone’s fault?’
Willow looked around at the cracked earth beneath her feet; the sun was ablaze in the sky, but winter’s soul had shrouded the earth with only shadows of ghosts. And so no matter how much that sun provided its heat, the mass extinction had done its thing. And yes, one day, maybe, life would find its way again, but for now, all that was left was the debris of homosapiens.
Plastic yoghurt pots rolled across the barren land like tumbleweeds, plastic wrapped tightly around the bones of some long-lost animal suffocated from the very plastic that now waved in the wind.

‘I have found you,’ Blaze had told Willow as he held her against the stump of the tree, ‘and so you have found me.’
Willow had smiled sadly up into his broken stare. The lights of his eyes had long gone out, as had her own.
‘Let’s let ourselves go,’ Willow said softly to him, ‘together.’
‘But I thirst for life.’ Blaze had protested.
‘We will thirst forever.’ Willow’s neck creaked as she lowered her eyes.
Blaze held her tighter in his arms, ‘The sun gives us life; we are living.’
‘This is not living, Blaze.’
Willow loosened herself from his arms, ‘Take out my solar panel.’ Her neck creaked as she craned it to look back at Blaze.
‘I…I can’t.’ Blaze said.
‘You can.’
Blaze began to whir, his head shook, ‘No! No! No! No!’ His left eye drooped, and a shard of loose glass dropped onto the cracked earth.

Since that day, a gulf had separated them. Blaze wandered about the cracked, parched plains marching northward on the same journey the trees had tried to make. The scorched bark of trees flaked and clung to their skeletal remains.
Blaze ripped a flake of bark and crushed it in his hands; a poem sought itself out in the through the mess of his electronic neurosis:

I am a refugee marching north on the wind
hoping my seed will disperse
far enough to traverse
these boundaries that will surely kill me
my roots are not fed
and there is no life left
but the wound that has bled
into the rivers
tricking down into the earth.

I could have shaded you from the sun
and thus the wind and the cold
but you let the blood run
never mind the lives slain
all for your fear of death.

Does irony feed you and quench your thirst?
When will you march with the skeletal remains of us?

And it was then that he heard the great despair taking wing into the air. The hollow cry of a humanoid who had torn her solar panel, the dying embers opened her lips, and the cry rang out through the plains of extinction.
Blaze bellowed back, and the moon’s crescent looked on, indifferent.

Of flesh and earth, we were torn – 500 word story.

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On the space station, there is another me in the flesh.
I am down here to explore the recovery of the earth or the lack thereof.
I have seen that the land is parched, and no life is in sight.
Any trees still standing are in the long drawn, out process of death and decay, leaning precariously.
I trailed a camera into the holes of such trees, and there was nothing.
Like staring into an abyss.
There was no life in that death.
This is not what death is supposed to be.
My big metal feet journey through vast expanses of land.
Death used to mean something, life. It meant life of some kind or other.
Now it means…nothing.
Which in turn makes life mean nothing.

And so up there myself in the flesh amongst others in their flesh, they are cocooned from the truth.
This is where I depart from myself, my soul, in the space station.
Where I become someone new.
We travelled different terrains, and new paths were forged inside ourselves.
He is of the flesh; I am of wheels, oil, plastics and metals.

‘Fox,’ Came the voice in my ear.
‘Max?’ I replied.
‘meet me at the mother tree.’

The mother tree is a huge colossus of a tree; it is dead. Its enormous girth leaning now to one side.
A massive hole within where even we humanoids can fit.

‘An earthquake or something is approaching,’ Max told me.

Earthquakes were common.

There were no birds, and my flesh self loves watching the birds in documentaries. My flesh self has never seen a real bird, nor have I.
He thinks one day he will be able to come back down to earth – in the flesh – and see the birds.
I don’t know what to tell you, Fox.
There are no birds, and none of our namesake either. I’m sorry.
I wish to tell you better news.

Max and I stood in the hole of the mother tree, and she groaned from inside like a tormented soul. It was painful to listen to.

In my head, I imagine contorted faces made of wood, a mouth open with screams unhearable to the human ear.
‘It’s time we tell them, above,’ I told Max.
Max nodded.

We signed off our lousy news with, ‘The only thing left of the earth is you.’

The truth is, fellow humans, you didn’t see yourself as the earth enough, so you used it like a commodity, not as a relationship between reciprocal beings.
The world was your oyster; the sky was the limit.
But you didn’t even stay to that supposed limit either, did you?

We all have and had an aversion to death which was only natural, but now I have seen there is no worse fate than the death of death.

Will the world ever recover? Maybe. But not in our lifetime. It’s too late for us.

And in my metal body, there are no tears I can cry.

Death is human

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I am much too tired to keep up the chase

Embroiled in this decline

All my friends, they die

And that would be okay

If I had faith

That the cycles of life weren’t being erased But what the fuck is there left to say?

As I suckle from the teat Knowing no better way?

There was a time when even death teemed with life

It seems no coincidence

Our depiction of death

is the skeleton

Of a fellow homosapien

Neon noose

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The neon world shone through the mist, the creatures called ‘humans’ or more scientifically, ‘homo sapiens’ were becoming like the dragonfish of the deep, deep ocean. Though their physical biology refused to become bioluminescent they were compensated for this by their adaptability and creative abilities.
The mist had become an ocean in which they constantly lived and had planet earth been a sentient being it may well have regarded humanity as its greatest mistake.

Their evolution of super adaptability meant they externalised many traits and habits other animals had inbuilt. With delusions of grandeur on a mass scale, the homo sapiens had no regard for animals, despite being one themselves, the animals in their linguistic headspaces had become ‘other,’ and expendable. Some homo sapiens had come to the conclusion they were making too many mistakes, indeed in one cartoon (something they created with an implement known as a pen) that caught my eye the homo sapien had drawn a dinosaur with a meteorite falling from the sky, one dinosaur looked to another and said, ‘We should do something about that,’ and the other said, ‘We can’t, it’ll hurt the economy.’ This cartoon was supposed to be something called comedy.
The laughing matter is that the cartoon was pointing out a real phenomenon. To the homo sapiens, the ‘economy’ was more important than saving their lives. And I have wondered ever since what sort of diety this ‘economy’ must have been to them that they were willing to sacrifice their lives for it. They worshipped this God called ‘economy’ and the thought of hurting this God was baulked at more than their own demise. Perhaps they believed in some kind of afterlife. They appeared trapped in a hell of their own making, the air was dense with all sorts of stuff they pumped into it daily. But they could not or would not help themselves. I believe they were all (a term they used) addicts.

They had divided such a line between themselves and the expendable others that they ironically othered themselves as a consequence.
They had mind-bending ideas that meant they figured anything ‘man-made’ was not nature, for they were above it or in some minds below it.
But the species were so fractured that although they lived by this principle even many of the homo sapiens who purported to be ‘at one with nature’ would baulk at ‘man-made’ progress and they didn’t see how this was a contradiction.
They figured themselves enlightened and the ones who would take them back to nature and none of them stopped to question, ‘When did we leave?’
Was it when they first harnessed electricity? Was it when they first landed a man on the moon?
If it was the earth that had birthed them in the whole scheme of things, then ‘man made’ need not be excluded from being called natural.
After all, it was their evolved capabilities that naturally gave them these abilities.

Homo sapiens by my alien (alien to them) observations, were addicts who were so out of fear of death.

If Homo sapiens were just mere natural beings then they too would perish, they too came from and were part of the dirt.

The homo sapiens were to the earth what the metallic starlings were to poison-dart trees.

Homo sapiens had the disadvantage that they were harmful to all of the earth, but the supposed advantage was their tendency to be highly adaptable.

But too many chose to ignore the signs, too many chose to ignore the men and women shouting and screaming that the world was on fire.

Because they were addicts.

All for fear of the thing they only brought more of, death.


And now, in their misty neon ghettos, they try to forget their inevitable demise, looking into the halo of a neon noose.

Plastic planet

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There was an orange glow beyond the pier, not a sunset but the apocalyptic glow of a world on fire.
The sea was fierce with the guts of humanities creative psyche, a plastic bottle rolling on the waves as if it was meant for the sea as much as the fishes swimming beneath it.

And with that thought, I swam up to the sky and as a God, I looked down and on closer inspection, I saw a fish in the bottle frantically thrashing. The bottle went along with the tide, and the fish swished and thrashed the water inside the bottle into a froth before it died of exhaustion and suffocation.

And then came up a whale with a gigantic splash creating its own menacing tide and gobbling up the plastic waste with the fish rotting and decaying inside.
I jumped down from the clouds and back onto the pier, jumping from the pier, I landed on a wooden post, balancing as if I was surfing a tidal wave before jumping to the post in front of it and then the next post till I reached the one that only just breached the surface of the ocean. My feet submerged under the blue.
Darkness descending but the orange glow in the distance remained and I was alone but for the plastic swimming in the tide.
From here it seemed I and the plastic tide were the only vestiges left of the great ape the Homosapien.

Stepping off the post into the deep, I swam and swam deeper and deeper into the sea until a gigantic plastic bottle jumped out of the water as if a whale and swallowed me whole.
My hands up against the transparent plastic, I prodded, thumped and I screamed till another even bigger bottle consumed the bottle and I and slowly as each bottle consumed one another the transparency waned till I could see nothing but the plastic that contained me.
I thrashed and thrashed and splashed and splashed just as the fish did, my body frantically hitting the sides of the plastic.
The water frothed at the storm I had raged, and then my exhausted body curled and resigned itself to its fate.

The final thing I heard was the plastic carrier bag rustle as it entombed the plastic bottles and I.

Sunday wordle: Beneath our civility a wry grin

Matt3 Comments

I don’t need an umbrella
walking through this pseudo forest
as the leaves lose their leathery coating
blushing red as they blunder
as if embarrassed
by their fall
the elves of autumn
cleaning the trees
while the doves coo and woo
and the Jays covet a squirrels cache of acorns
and I, just a small part of the picture
walk and tumble through
pondering on the permanence
of our damage done like a tattoo
on the landscape while trying to find a place
non human to dispose of my civility
a wry smile hidden by a mane of hair
as I recognise I’m so much more at peace
without that polite formal mimicry.