Tag Archives: coal

Day 19 — Reef + 10,000

Love a good pun. & irony. So ironical puns. Brilliant. Even if the topic is depressing as hell & makes me want to drink bleach.

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Great Barrier Grief

Australians are experts in irony
(& coaly, but that’s a different topic) 
hence why we’ve built a mega-massive 
coal transport terminal on the coast
bordering the Great Barrier Reef 
the only living structure visible from space

hey! we gotta get these coal-filled 
show boats to China & Indonesia somehow

— it’s not our fault there’s a few bits of coral in the way 

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Day 19 – TIL about reefs

10,000 years 

by midcentury, pretty much every reef 
in the world will be crumbling ruins

— gone after enduring 250 million years

in a blink of geological time, they’ll return
but it’ll be 10,000 years before we see a reef again

— assuming “we” even survive ourselves 

Day 26 – 10 billion dollar fossils

Saw an article which was published yesterday with the headline: Australian fossil fuel subsidies hit $10.3 billion in 2020-21. This number seems shocking, unless you know anything at all about anything. Given how tired I am from getting all the past 9 days poems up, I thought it’s low hanging fruit, but I’m gonna pick it anyway. (Some poet days are harder than others.)

NB still had issues uploading photo so it’s not completely solved: had to restart computer three times before it “took”.

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10 billion dollar fossils 

Scummo & his LNP dinosaurs
are increasing fossil fuel subsides
as they’re being phased out worldwide

every minute of last year $19,686 
was given to coal oil & gas companies 
& major users of fossil fuels

they like to pretend 
they’re important players
giving back to the economy

instead of the socialist teat 
sucking velociraptors they are

— give em an indue card 
& be done with em

Day 21 – sacrifice zones

Big extractive companies don’t care where the goodies are; don’t care what has to be destroyed to get to them; just hope a new source of fossil fuels isn’t found near your place.

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sacrifice zones

big mining, petrochemical companies
& heavy industry — that is: extractivists — 
are all compelled by their gross beliefs

there are places that don’t matter
there are people that don’t matter
they must think this so these matter

less  nothings can be strip-mined-open-pit 
mined-clear-felled-transformed into toxic
waste dumps-dug up-drained-destroyed 

so air can be poisoned
so effluent can be pumped into rivers
so soil can be contaminated with heavy metals

& they will to continue to extract
in order to continue making a profit
they will continue to sacrifice everything

even the   earth   herself

Day 20 — solastalgia

Playing with a word I learnt last year and thought might make a good poem title (& hopefully poem).

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solastalgia 

The homesickness you have when you are still at home.

word & definition coined by Glenn Albrecht
Australian philosopher & Professor of Sustainability

that peculiar 
form of distress 
that envelopes us 
in a misty kind 
of claustrophobic 
cling wrap
when we see our 
homelands both 
lived & idealised
lands which bring 
peace simply by being
give us tranquility
remind us to breath
to hope  to sit 
quietly   & still   & just

when we feel those lands
callously destroyed 
paddocks ploughed under
for another subdivision
megahardware store
or discount supermarket 
or cut open for coal
or fracked  set on fire  covered in oil  torn up by trucks

then
there is no solace

Day 18 — frackwit

Pretty self-explanatory.

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frackwit

the same Prime Smirker 
who once gloated about
how good coal is on the floor
of the Australian parliament
is today raving about 
the multitude of climate saving
virtues (to hear him spout it)
of natural gas

the same guy who appointed 
a couple of natural gas wonks
to his COVID-19 recovery taskforce
which later (to no one’s surprise)
revealed that the way out of our
Covid-induced economic coma was … 
{ da-dah }
Nat. U. Ral.  Gas. &. Lots of it.

this fracking clown is relentlessly
smirking while the world burns

i only hope the pentecostal hell
he so fervently believes in is real
& he ends up sweating down there

eternally