I am over-populating. I am the future

I am dirty. I am greasy

I am stained. I am dusty

I am peeling. I am oily

I am stinking. I am tired

I am worn-out. I am used up

I am ill-kempt. I am runny

I am unshorn. I am unplanned

I am disgusting. I am contagious

I am pus-filled. I am wheezing

I am dehydrated. I am flaking

I am sad. I am crying

I am lacking. I am broken

I am nursing. I am filthy

I am untouchable. I am illiterate

I am penniless. I am scabby

I am red-eyed. I am disease-ridden

I am muddied. I am infectious

I am suppurating. I am under-weight

I am cysting. I am sunburned

I am bitten-up. I am exploited

I am pitiable. I am begging

I am smelly. I am singed

I am suffering. I am confused

I am fleeing. I am stumbling

I am un-vaccinated. I am forgotten

I am contaminated. I am overlooked

I am pissing. I am drinking

I am newborn. I am cast-off

I am passed by. I am uncounted

I am ignored. I am in rags

I am crowded. I am praying

I am breeding. I am crusty

I am failing. I am excess

I am dull. I am malnourished

I am bleeding. I am spreading

I am over-populating. I am the future

Industry Self-Regulation Not Gov’t Intrusion

Surely logging interests wouldn’t clearcut so far as to silt up the streams and ruin riparian habitat

Hog farmers will responsibly provide us with affordable chops without just dumping all the manure

Altruistic corporate leaders won’t boost profits with cheaper, un-inspected, foreign food ingredients

Surely it can’t cost us a hundred times what it costs Africans for the privilege of having a cell phone

Oil producers will surely have proven tested contingency plans and practiced emergency procedures

Factories won’t simply dump untested new chemicals just because there’s not yet a law against them

Surely banks would not bet against funds they built to fail yet still push them to good customers

Secret internal monitoring will probably prevent rogue perverted clergy from molesting our children

Insurers would never pay commissions for twisting arcane technicalities to deny costly procedures

We also don’t need government death panels making treatment decisions for good family doctors

Unregulated mountain top removal will yield us a safe and cheap, coal-based energy independence

You really can count on wise global oligarchs, meeting in secret, to craft a better world for us all

Trust selfless defense contractors to patriotically hold down costs and not invent bogeymen

Unconstrained, agribusiness will conserve water, provide safe foods and sustain our soils forever

Industries will self-regulate to reduce CO2 emissions even though it may even reduce their profits

Setting the amount of salt, calories and fats in our food is best left to corporate marketers

The Best and Brightest over there on Wall Street must be permitted unfettered financial innovation

Supply and demand will prevent invisible multinationals from strip-mining the open seas of all life

Heavy-handed rules and regulation can only cost hard-working families excessive jobs and money

Industry councils will devise voluntary guidelines to properly address virtually any issue

BigPharma wont push phony lifestyle drugs, ignore 3^rd world suffering and jack up generic prices

The informed consumer will wisely avert epidemics of obesity, diabetes and coronary disease

Lifetime judges would never actively misinterpret the constitution to misconstrue the people’s will

Monopolies, tariffs and subsidies without oversight or taxes are not the only corporate lobbying goals

Investment banks do not use their unregulated financial creativity to blackmail world markets

Lawyers would never let their ads degenerate into despicably misleading sales pitches to sufferers

Real estate professionals nobly self-monitor conflicts of interest, omissions and deceptions

Gamblers, smokers and drinkers can retain control of their lives thru Personal Responsibility

Carmakers would’ve tackled safety, economy and emissions themselves without intrusive mandates

Food conglomerates don’t need oversight for targeting kids with addiction to caffeine, sugar and fat

Merging cable providers actually does increase competition, efficiency and lowers consumer prices

A fuel of blind sociopathic greed guided by short term stock gains yields our globally optimum future

No one would dream of creating a non-profit to swindle duped donors out of contributions

Fuzzy and expensive sustainability policies lead back down the slippery slope of that failed socialism

Unfettered, untraceable access to any type of weapon is a god-given, constitutionally-enshrined right

Secretly spying on our private lives requires no oversight if we, as citizens really have nothing to hide

Gone Off in Empty Silence With So Much Unsaid

You had always lived like the time to sagely compose your real message was still to come

But actually you’ve gone off quite silently now, and it seems likely, into eternal emptiness

You felt you waited patiently, still ready to make your statement or to take some real action

Now, it’s hard for others to really know if you were the silent type, or just another empty shell

Gone off in silence but not without leaving a wide trail of random noise and messy litter

As far as we can tell, the space you leave behind still unsullied by any conscious reflection

Your blurry recollections, sloppily stored, simply evaporate, unsorted and un-distilled

That is, finished but not summarized, finalized but not completed, gone but not packed up

Went away unprepared, unwilling and unable to form even a short and sensible goodbye

Borne off, you thought, before your time, with yet so much you had never even started

Carried off of the couch to the hospital, then to the cemetery without even a decent interval

You raised your hand far too late, buried without even having thought out a real question

Gone beyond our limited communications even should you find your true voice at last

We will label it a so-called mute testimony and say it was really all you planned on leaving

Caught off-guard and carried away in silence, or did you actually have nothing at all to say?

Hey! Nobody could ever read the beautiful thoughts that may have existed, but only in your head

You have departed, having tacitly accepted things as they were going, and are going further still

Now you have left it to us impute your beliefs merely from your mundane habits

We can’t know your brilliance and grand emotions from your so very ordinary life

Though your soul may have been filled to bursting, it has all evaporated, without any residue

Your wondrous family surrounds you now, but you call each one by a different name

With the drugs, you cannot realize that they know you’ve already gone off in silence

The past is closing in around you because you can no longer process the present

Though your greatest works still await you, there is only a future that you will not experience

Yet, there still are those many things you would have, could have, and, likely, should have done

In your mind, you kept reserved the future for those special tasks that you were born to do

But the short time you paused was confused by a drugged pain, in impersonal surroundings

The last thing you read was another bill and the last thing you wrote was a check

You did not plan on your self-numbing repetitions halting without some decent interlude

There was only time to cap off your life with a short period of deliriously painful suffering

Torn away so quickly and completely with barely time for the briefest of regrets

Gone off in a silence that we can only try to differentiate from a simple & mindless emptiness

Fireflies Faltered Beneath Our Progress

The tiny flickering glows of those little fireflies are winking out all over, without a sound

Their demise was briefly noted somewhere after the real news of Sports and Entertainment

Still, some ask, without the fireflies, can the fairies really be so very far behind?

Your children will not miss them but, as for us, we saw them and we actually let them go

Their merely wondrous blinking, wafting in tall meadows apparently was not enough to save them

For the spread of civilization brought our ordained progress to bear with blunt force, against them

Their bobbing in the grasses proved ineffectual against our blindly-mechanical spread

At least their demise can be euphemized as simply a sad, but unintended, collateral destruction

However, that magical fragility which had once made us skip lightly and gently sing, is gone forever

The fireflies are faltering and we lack the time or money to save them, or even to say goodbye

Yet, all those who saw them doubtlessly retained the memory for their entire lives

Unlike all the forgotten entertainment and the randomizing blur of this, our day-to-day existence

Without any time for triage their fate was quickly sealed, somewhere well off of, our social radar

Cool green lights winking out unnoticed during commercials amidst corporate sports extravaganzas

Still, their extinction may have indirectly contributed some tiny fraction to a rise in quarterly GDP

Yet all of us have been reduced by this, only marginally beneficial, god-granted taking of dominion

The faltering of the fireflies does not prove us to be simply a ruthless and destructive lot

Their small vacancy surely does not unzip the very fabric of the summer night

Certainly their tiny niches must indeed be quickly claimed by other life forms

After all, every creature comes and goes from the loving breast of this sustaining earth

Their humbly entertaining forays paled in comparison to our far weightier concerns

Like the flowers that we bulldozed, they did not produce or consume, much less reap or sow

And, as His good stewards of this entire blue-green world, we cannot be lessened by their absence

They formed, after all, but a single stitch in the densely-woven tapestry of life on earth

The unnecessary beauty and grace of the fireflies conferred them no survival advantage

Their phosphorescence really wasn’t such a magical mystery, viewed thru our earthy wisdom

We could always build robot firefly drones with LEDs and artificial swarm intelligence

Their demise then but a minor chord in the squishy symphony of fine things being crushed underfoot