Tag Archives: morethanariverinegypt

Day 12 — denial + heart is a muscle

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These guys have been in my poetic sights ever since I first read This Changes Everything. I regularly cite the key tenet of this poem in discussion with CC deniers.

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Heartlessland

i.
one of the most strident 
climate change deniers
is american conservative 

think tank — & i use
those words advisedly — 
the heartland institute 

by rabidly rejecting 
the scientific consensus 
on climate change it has done

perhaps more damage than
even the trillion dollar 
fossil fuel corporations

that put us here

ii.
to the surprise of no one
this organisation took the coin 
of tobacco giant philip morris

spent the 90s discrediting 
smoking’s health impacts, the risk 
of secondhand smoke & fighting smoking bans

i guess that says it all

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Day 12 – TI Wrote some heart poems as easy as shooting fish in a barrel 

miles & litres

supposedly my heart pumps 
almost 7 litres of blood around 

the over 60, 000 miles 
of blood vessels in my body

every. single. minute.

& i’ve driven each. & every 
one of them
                      twice. 
          looking for the slightest
   signpost
that you still love me

BONUS #1 — above average 

the average heart
beat of a woman 
is (on average) 
8 beats a minute faster 
than a man’s
— assuming it beats
at all

(i always said 
you weren’t average)

BONUS #2 — all I want for Xmas

each year more heart attacks occur
on Christmas Day than any other

Monday, likewise, has more cardiac assaults
than any other day of the week

Lookout 2028 emergency rooms
when Christmas falls on a Monday!

Day 1 – denial of a different kind

It’s April which means, once again, that the ghosts of Na/GloPoWriMo walk among us.  Ever year I debate about whether I should participate, & every year I end up saying to myself “come on, suck it up”

Last year (you might recall) was a wee bit of a crazy one … & to reflect that I wrote every poem around the theme of corona & plague & pandemics & virus.   For me at least, it worked very well. I got to explore a hot topic in a range of ways; while managing to produce 4 or 5 reasonably high quality poems on the topic, in a range of styles. So I intend trying the same trick this year — except this time the 30 poems won’t be about the world ending in plague. Whew! Everyone says. 

No, this year I intend to explore heat & climate change & extreme weather events. It’s a topic I’ve already penned a dozen or so poems about; but given it really is the burning topic of the age, it’s one I’ve wanted to explore more. Indeed, it feels like there’s a moral obligation as an artist to explore it; and for the world to actually act on it.

denial of a different kind 

when a thing — 
the threat of a thing
is so — so vastly big
ordinary brains
(brains that are far
from brilliant
at even the best of times)
— become bamboozled, 
boggled, & literally 
bogged into inaction —
thoughts unable to move
in any direction — 
stuck under a quick
sand miasma of missed
information
— real & imagined

it seems all this simple
mind is capable of
is crawling beneath 
the covers & hiding
from the immensity
of the impending
holocaust

the only apparent
benefit being at least 
my doona-clutching 
cowardice won’t generate 
too much in the way
of excess carbon costs