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.

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.

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)

[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)