At Least We'll All Be Gone

That grab-it-now gouging at the face and guts of the earth will have to stop quite soon

That utter waste of building things with which only to kill and destroy, that surely ends as well

Not much longer will all these river systems simply be used by us solely as convenient drains

At least our incessant, foolish, noisy, advertising braying can’t go on forever

Happily, the car salesmen, real estate agents, lawyers and bankers will also disappear, real soon

Thank god that any day now we’ll stop making pointless noise just because we think we can

At least we’ve unknowingly but irrevocably rushed beyond many decisive tipping points

In any case, blowing shit up in celebration will be forgotten in a very short geologic timeframe

The fall of our lamely-glitzed entertainment empire will be a most pleasant side-effect

At least our wasteful but paranoid night lights will be replaced once more by honest darkness

At a minimum, we can rejoice in the eternal loss of the invisible wisdom of our corporate fathers

Thankfully, politicians will no longer read speechesn that their donors had others write for them

At least no more toxic wastes will be illegally dumped secretly, but profitably, in the night

Fool treehuggers wont have to feel responsible for killing off recently-cataloged, unstudied species

Happily the refrain of ‘too expensive in jobs and money’ won’t ever be voiced again

Healthcare rationing will no longer be a worry as both patients and providers rapidly decline

Maybe the ocean will re-attain its balance far more quickly than greenie whiners ever said

Luckily, its impossible for us to expunge every single living cell on this entire planet

At most only 99% of all the amphibians will be poisoned, infected or bulldozed into oblivion

At least the malls will decompose quickly and the McMansions will be rapidly overgrown

In any case, squishes wont be around to whine about how much they miss those stupid songbirds

Adieu to the mass plunder of simple faith by fictional religions twisted to greedy ends

At least the end of corporate-created, artificially-induced over-consumption is close at hand

One good by-product is the silencing of our loud pride in our willful ignorance and illiteracy

Officials wont need expensive fictions to justify preemptively-defensive wars of liberation

At least tons of foolishly wasted reusable resources will no longer be buried with our toxic wastes

The omnipresent backbeat of political and advertising propaganda will fall silent at last

Finally, the Jews and all their many enemies will lay down together in an everlasting peace

At least all of us wont have to pay for yet another of their foolish financial meltdowns

Happily, our teens wont text a thousand empty but expensive messages per week

Our emissions will be cut to nothing without any intrusive regulations or wasteful taxes

We can stop ignoring the fact that our own overpopulation causes almost all of our problems

Mercifully, more 14 hour per day Chinese wage slaves living 20 to a room won’t be needed

Amen to death to any infidels choosing incorrectly from our many fictional One True Gods

Without regrets, the end of our holocaust against the domestic animals will come to pass

At least, it will be quite obvious that we cannot shortchange any more future generations

Aliens Judge Earth And Humans From Space

This whirling green and blue planet, sparkling with white clouds, bright and shimmering seas,

dazzling icecaps, dusty brown deserts, wrinkled snowy mountain ranges and twinkling city lights

Smudged by the smoke from wood fires and factories, wrinkled by roads,

pock-marked by settlements, scratched by the hands of the creatures that evolved here

Full of life from its poles down to its deepest ocean trenches,

its surface animated by the heat stored within,

that amazingly thin atmosphere, rich in oxygen, too rich in our CO²

More than a miracle, though not all that it could be,

spot of life in the emptiness, isolated in a blackness so many light years across,

journeys with its sun ‘til the end of its days

Tilting its axis two times in each orbit, white snow filling the shadow,

as green effloresces under the sun,

whirling in tandem with a huge, silvery moon which brings the tides rippling

and rising in its orbital phases,

seemingly everywhere a beautifully complex set of natural reactions

And one there is of all the species that has cataloged and explained, hypothesized and sermonized, philosophized and capitalized, worshiped and desecrated,

whose work and whose effluvia can be seen from above.

So what would they think looking down from above?

is it a horrid little nest to be kicked hard and snuffed,

or a pleasant, shady grove to pause and relax in?

You be the judge in your home quite safe and warm,

or you make the call tending your fire, poverty-stricken and forlorn,

You show those strangers your wondrous technology, art and possessions,

or hold out your child to them, filthy and emaciated,

and look away as you mumble a confused and meaningless confession

Analyzing Human Extinction

They might have been viewed as precursors, had their line not ended quite so abruptly

Their culture could possibly have evolved into more than a simple, greedy self-destruction

Maybe their fossils would have been enshrined in chapels, museums and laboratories

Looking at their petrified remains might have even inspired great awe and wonder in little ones

Their lifestyle in an ancient era would have been a lesson to their grateful descendants

Emergence from a rough and tumble past might have resulted later, in a state of grace

Their patchwork history and tattered legends could have easily anchored great cultures

Viewed as ancestors, their violent habits would have been seen in a totally different light

They might have passed on valuable lessons from out of a vast sea of ancient experience

Perhaps distant progeny would have honored them and sought out their blessings

It might have been possible that they formed the stem of a still-flowering species tree

Their DNA could have contributed to something beyond their short, harsh and angry tale

Had their seed carried on, their venal struggles might not now appear so foolish and so vain

Were they not evolutionary dead-ends their violence and waste might possibly make sense

Without wantonly destroying their supporting environment, they could have carried on

Possibly, if they did not extinguish so many other species, they could have even loved one another

Outcomes may have differed if their myths had endowed everlasting souls to all living things

Could have survived had they not gifted themselves exclusive domain over their one planet

Maybe their self-granted commandment to be fruitful resulted in their toxic overpopulation

Certainly the warfare demanded by their many one true gods contributed to their demise

They might not have shambled off into early oblivion had they escaped their own Social Darwinism

If they could have appreciated their inheritance, they might have planned for their legacy

Perhaps not basing their economy on shortsighted greed would have led to more success

Finally taking action only after they had collapsed their ecosystem was not a viable survival strategy

Maybe not gauging their progress solely upon extractive consumption would have helped

Trusting in ponzi perpetual growth instead of steady state survival probably aided their demise

Their never-begotten offspring might not have disdained their elders as irrelevant fools

Had they the sense not to bring on a mass extinction, things might have been very different

Possibly their urge to killing did not serve them as self-appointed stewards of the earth

Maybe market solutions were not appropriate for blindly solving all of their world’s problems

Basing price on demand did not ensure the long-term availability of any of their finite resources

Placing their bloated population’s marketed needs before the one planet that sustained them failed

They might have explored the universe had they not destroyed their own spaceship earth

In the end, their perpetual and expensive warfare did not confer to them any survival advantage

If they had not always followed monomaniacal will-to-power freaks, they might still exist

But, instead, they are rightly known as the precursors of nothing and the ancestors to no living beings

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