2 poems by Gerard Manogue

further away from hell on earth

further away from hell on earth

sitting in your dorm room in 2011

under a dim red light

not worried about pestilence or supply chains

or the mayan calendar

telling you over japanese whisky

that further into the anthropocene

the climate would be less livable

ten years later i was right

our nation went from being

a shining city on a hill

to a shrieking city in a ditch

and my fear could power

that machine that has been dispatched

to the great pacific garbage patch

trying to save the phytoplankton

producing the oxygen you breathe

---

the bacchanalia will be short lived

the bacchanalia will be short lived

as the fruit has stopped flowering

it was written in the hieroglyphs

that the grapes could not survive the summer

the global superpowers

are developing hypersonic missiles

while the redwoods smolder

atlantic meridional overturning circulation

is shutting down

while the malls are completely vacant

bovine skeletons in death valley come to life

as aquamarine earth turns into amber venus

even pharoah could not see

the steamy dissolution of his firstborn’s soul

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