Your cars are so many pawns creeping over

The checkerboard of Man versus Nature,

Each automobile an assemblage of cold metal and pungent exhaust gas

A diesel-breathed queen ready to pulverize the defenseless

Stags and does of this once-green and blue land

Into still bloody slabs of venison piled upon eloquent silverware

In the “civilized” eateries where you and your sweetheart

Dined under many a tranquil night of velvety black.

You regard the cannibalism of hamsters and mantises with disdain

You detest the mosquitoes that swarm forth under a blazing sun

You demonize the shark for rare atrocities that unfold when humans invade

The midnight blue recesses they haunt

And yet,

You rape and kill

Poison and obliterate kin

Among whom you trod

Watching in maniacal glee as the scarlet blood seeps into

The dirt and grime amassed in the dark alleyways of your cities.

These cities, villages, and hamlets galore

Built in petrifaction and fear

For you

Such hairless embodiments of vulnerability

Could not coexist in peace with the beasts of the wilderness

And so you were driven,

Your nonexistent tail quivering between your legs,

Out of the bountiful bosom of Mother Earth.

You snarl at these provocative

words, stuffing your ears with the toxic sludge

That pours out of the grisly factories which fuel

Your corrupt industry,

You endure the reek

Of your fellow humans

Who breath the rancid air you force down your disease-laced throat

For this planet has become a drab brown warehouse

Clogged not with goods,

But with mass oceans of humans,

Their ragged, dirty clothing serving as the only barrier between

The malnourished bodies of the living

And dead.

Cataclysmic nuclear warheads, so many rays

Of surrogate sunlight disguising smoking angels of death

Have been leveled at the tear-stained heart of Mother Earth,

And your evil-infused, rotten fingers hover above the trigger.

Long have you searched in the depths of the cosmos

For an alien race stalking ever closer towards your wilting planet

But you, the people

Have been all along

The harbingers

Of Earth’s

doom.