Category: 2020 and after
Poetry written since 2020
TPODB
Regulatory agencies are charged with setting limits on hazardous practices and toxic materials in various scenarios. Let’s examine a few examples and their consequences:
Emissions from combustion of fossil fuels are known to kill millions of people anually. There are some attempts to reduce these, but most people seem to regard the megadeaths as “the price of doing business” (TPODB). Gas and diesel automobile emissions have been dramatically curtailed over the last few decades, but leaving your car running in a closed garage is still a popular method of suicide. Oh well, that’s TPODB.
Alcohol, nicotine and opioids together kill countless people every year, but as a society we like them. Furthermore, governments fund themselves from huge “sin taxes” on self-destruction, so again that’s TPODB.
Private firearms kill more than one person in 10,000 every year in the USA, but their private possession is guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the US Constitution and quite profitable for some gun manufacturers… so, TPODB.
Falls cause around two-thirds of all accidental deaths in Canadians aged 65 years and older, while for those under 65, accidental poisonings were the top (nearly 70%) accidental cause of death in Canada. Oh well… TPODB!
Radiation releases from nuclear reactors have killed a total of… well, there’s some disagreement: the worst ever reactor accident (Chernobyl, 26 April 1986) killed about 30 people outright and about 60 clearly attributable to radiation from the disaster in the subsequent decades; beyond that, estimates range from 4,000 (UN IAEA report) to 200,000 (Greenpeace). The wild predictive fluctuations arise from the fact that roughly 40% of all people will get cancer in their lifetimes and roughly 20% of all deaths are from cancer; so even the Greenpeace estimate amounts to an assumption that the 200 million or so people exposed to some fallout from Chernobyl would have had their cancer-death probability raised from 20% to 20.1% by that small exposure — a very difficult statistical speculation to prove! Appeals to the “Precautionary Principle” indicate an exceptional reluctance to apply TPODB to radiation.
Why is that? How is cancer caused by radiation so much more horrible than cancer caused by coal pollution or car exhaust or smoking or drinking?
This peculiar terror has led to cowardice on the part of regulatory agencies, which employ the “Linear, No Threshold” (LNT) model for dleterious health effects of low-dose radiation to set maximum doses from reactors below the inescapable background radiation levels in our natural environment, leading to the “As Low As Reasonable Achievable” (ALARA) design criteria for reactor designs, which caused the 28 new reactors ordered in the USA in 1974 to all be cancelled; few have been built in the intervening 4 decades.
Meanwhile the world is cooking in greenhouse gases, smoldering in forest fires, being torn apart by hurricanes and drowning in glacial melt — all perfectly acceptable, apparently, as TPODB — while the nuclear power plants (that could supply plentiful, reliable, dispatchable power sufficient to deal with all these consequences of TPODB) are not being built because they might raise our probability of dying of cancer from 20% to 20.001 %. Meanwhile we smoke, drink, drive gas guzzlers as fast as possible, buy guns, take drugs and walk down concrete steps without a railing because, hey, that’s TPODB!
Pond Haiku
Eight lotus blossoms,
the garniture of nature,
grace my summer pond.
Pellets strike water,
calling up to the surface
hundreds of goldfish.
Stillness at twilight:
heron standing on one leg
waits for a target.
The pond shrinks with heat,
leaving green algae billows.
The fish wait for cold.
(July 4, 2024)
PROFIT
Commerce is forever based on Profit —
on denial of the First and Second Laws.
No need to be an Economics prof; it
means transactions only get applause
when someone gets the best of someone else
and reaps a greater harvest than they sow,
while losers have to tighten up their belts
and cry in shame while profit-makers crow.
Ever since we dug up coal and oil
we’ve all been making profits off our planet,
using up the animals and soil
until there’s nothing left of it but granite.
It doesn’t have to be this way, you know.
Zero doesn’t have to be the sum.
There’s plenty if the fruits of labor go
to every one and thing, not just to some.
Cockroaches
In Florida “palmetto bugs” are in your face.
Hawaii’s giant flying roaches land on you.
Cockroaches are everywhere but out in space;
the German ones ubiquitous, and never few.
They seem to bounce right back from being stomped and squished.
They laugh at radiation levels that should kill.
They taste your gourmet meal before it’s even dished,
right after wallowing in steaming septic swill.
They have a lot in common with us apex predators,
devouring everything, our hunger never fed,
or with the agents of our commerce: creditors.
They will be here long after other life is dead.
They can survive ordeals that reason says they couldn’t,
or that, I sometimes feel, like Homo sap., they shouldn’t.
A Good War
War we know. We are comfortable with it:
kill or be killed, what could be simpler?
Relax into thoughtless endocrine storm
and enjoy the absence of choice.
Politics are harder. Choosing between contradictions
and accepting heartbreaking compromises
is too stressful. We’d rather make it like war,
demonize the Other and win at all costs.
Now we must face the cruelest test of all:
dealing with the physical consequences
of our addiction to comfort, convenience and profit.
Nature cannot be bought off by lobbyists.
We could easily save ourselves
if we could only make climate change a war,
identify The Enemy and plan its annihilation…
but wait, we’ve done that already!
How can we make war on destruction?
How can cooperation satisfy our bloodlust?
How can we all be on the same side?
How can we be what we’ve never been?
Arlo
Here lived Arlo, a good dog and true.
I’m sorry I sometimes yelled at you.
I wish I had hugged you and flopped your ears
more often before today’s sad tears.
Barking at neighbors on the street,
you yelped and fell near to my feet.
You shook and twitched, I came to you,
but there was nothing I could do.
The vet said probably heart attack.
I just wish I could get you back
to chase the rabbits and catch the ball
that now sits lonely upon the wall.
We ran together the river trail.
I would plod while you would sail.
Your grace was ever my inspiration
And I wish I could match your dedication.
(15 June 2022)
Objective Love
Baby, I love you.
This all began two billion years ago
when our profligate prokaryote ancestors
played messy gene-swapping games of
conjugation, transformation and transduction.
That works great, especially if you need to
quickly evolve resistance to antibiotics,
but it doesn’t lend itself to stability,
so those ephemeral unicells never had time
to grow differentiated colonies.
That required also a little cell wall strength,
so eukaryotes grabbed that niche right away
and 1.2 billion years ago it was a eukaryote
who invented true sex.
Baby, I love you.
(10 June 2020)
In Progress
Words do not return my love.
Thrashing, spinning, bleeding tears, I cry, “What the fuck is this?”
They wait for the end of childishness, maddeningly patient.
OK. OK. Here we go.
This madness, this death cult, this plague
does not discriminate between intelligent and stupid,
between educated and ignorant,
between rich and poor, or between colours of skin.
It is more infectious, more versatile and more deadly
than the coronavirus. Comedian commentators
have done a disservice ridiculing only the deranged
MAGA morons, ignoring that he also has control
of the minds of many Senators, Governors and Yale grads.
We need urgently to understand how this mind-virus
skirts our mental leukocytes and forces the DNA of the soul
to churn out more copies of itself.
(9 Jan 2021)
Granny
[expanded version of the poem 2022]
Is this a poem?
How could I tell?
Are these feelings?
Is this a life?
I recapitulate my grandmother:
Her parents were wealthy farmers in Germany
but “They didn’t like the Kaiser,”
so they moved to Nebraska — rich farmers
on good land.
Adventurous spirit, she went to college in Chicago
whence my grandfather whisked her away to Florida,
promising an agricultural wonderland.
It was!
Florida grew any/everything like magic.
She picked and dressed and cooked miracles.
I got to crank the black cast iron separator
that turned fresh milk from the cow
into milk, cream and butter.
Pop read Kipling to me
and told me of Yutch,
the idiot on the survey team
with whom he crossed the continent
and avoided World War I.
Pop taught me to fish and hunt
and let me teach myself to read.
He was a good man in a bad time.
Granny could do anything.
But then Pop died.
For a decade she traveled the world
seeing every sight and bringing home mementos
but all she really wanted to remember was him
and when that longing couldn’t be distracted
she turned to daytime TV and junk food,
renouncing her life.
Her life got even
by hanging on to her for 103 years.
Finally she refused to eat, and we let her go.
So today, after two years of plague
and a decade of undetected fascist takeover
and a lifetime of burning fossil fuels
I grow numb from watching the southern sky
for fireballs
and the news for climate catastrophe
and daytime TV starts to appeal
and junk food starts to look good
and I’m tired of being ashamed
for doing too little to stop this
and I wonder when I’ll stop eating.
(20 March 2022)