320,000 Birds in One Month

Falcons and sparrows robins and wrens
Plummeting through our consciousness down from the sky;
Dead turtles and fish, scales, scutes and skin
Rim the cartilaginous shores
What must ever be will die,
It seems, even
The monarch butterfly.

Humans and animals kith and kin
Links in the chain of life now in vertigo;
The purchase—it stalls, the debit card PIN
Lost in three fogs and a brain tumor.
Pine trees burned at the roots, what used to be a row
Of them, after the wildfires hit—
More anguish to hoe

On a planetoid globe in cancerous throes.
T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald—wisdom and insight
Now become increasingly rare human traits—bows
Tied around the coffins. The vomit, the Washington Post,
Tender no longer is the night.
The pharmaceutical executive reached
For the switch on the light,

But the power outage had hit two-thirds of the state.
In all this country, this kind of weather,
Media celebrities, politicians unhinged,
Anthropos on the midnight train to Georgia,
Overhead the skies have become a nether
World of dueling tanker jets and sprayed muck.
Blighted fruits, our meals now seasoned leather…

Genial humor,
‘And that’s the news,’
The vacuum
Goes kaaaruuumppffff—
Firmament collapse,
Truly we wonder—
320,000 birds
in one
m
o
n
t
h
.

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