In days of yore, I would gape at the prairie
        in its untaught beauty,
        soft with Dawn’s golden kiss—
white-wine waves of chilled wheat
        rolling in gentle gusts;
dense forestry
        breathing with fauna;
birds laced with silver plumes
        gliding gracefully along nature’s lush fingertips;
and clamor, population, and friction latent.

The cobalt ceiling
       which no one had hitherto transcended
lay above me—
I myself was a culture, alone and removed from the huddled.

No one had yet been exposed
to the pixels, the beeps, the incessant droning
       of synthetic intellect.
It was a separate epoch,
       a largely unaffected one,
but time fled,
       and a double-edged sword was bequeathed to modernity.

Before me today lie the forest and the prairie,
       the former gone,
       the latter a plant—
the kind of plant
       that spews up virulence
       and the cancerous exhaust
               that juliennes my coal-black lungs slowly, secretly, silently.

So, I now tiptoe around the “prairie,”
       sidestepping pits of bubbling oil
       and sniffing metalized sunflowers
              with a gasmask.