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| Planet Earth, 1972 |
The Anthropocene
is cancer on the planet:
people are everywhere,
from suburbia to homeless, and in a crowded
Indian street someone yelling
"1.2 Billion!!", full of fervour
celebrating India's population
surpassing that of China;
while in Beijing tofu houses,
disintegrating apartment blocks,
begin to crumble as concrete mixed
with sand crumbles in your hand,
someone's always cutting corners
to increase profit;
it's all paper tiger here
on Planet Earth,
a papier maché society
of cities and cars and pollution;
civilization founded on graft and grief,
and appearance always
over everything else,
there are just too many people
roaming the planet, scratching
out a living in dirt and sand,
dominion over animals, trees, insects,
birds, lakes and rivers, oceans and seas,
we're killing everything, extinction
for the natural world, we're killing birds
with windmill generators, while
off Long Island whales are dying
where windmills as tall
as the Chrysler Building
stand ominous a mile off shore;
it's the Anthropocene cancer—
Stephen Spender: "The more
I am acquainted with my dog
the less I like humans."
Think of Detroit
where middle class people lived,
half the population uprooted,
moved to other cities,
suburbs, slums
or living on the side
of a road, a trailer park,
a Walmart parking lot,
from city life to homeless, city blocks
returned to weeds, sidewalks
crumbled, electricity
cut off, water mains broken
at 3 a.m., never repaired,
the residual cancer
of too many people, it's become
hell on earth; the Anthropocene
is spreading, changing the planet
to a likeness of ourselves, people sleeping
in NYC subway cars, migrants
sprawled across two seats
legs spread open, and at the
bazaars in Thailand, hoards of
people out at night, they're all
eating roast chicken, steamed
rice, mountains of food, by morning
it's mountains of shit, piss river,
and buckets of semen, the same
in South America, just too many people
degrading the noosphere and changing
everything that once was,
the US border jammed with migrants
streaming across, here they come folks,
from all over the world, truckloads
of young men, people fleeing at night
for their lives, fleeing
across the border, people
from China and Cuba and Venezuela
and Africa; if you own anything
soon you'll own nothing, you'll
be homeless, soon you'll rent
everything, listening to second rate music
from America, even the fine arts
have been desecrated by people
with no talent, no vision,
no craft; in the future
everything you own
you'll be able to carry
in case you have to run
like hell, across the fields,
through the darkened streets,
behind the razor wire, the barbed wire,
it's not going to get greener this way,
it used to be a lush world, green
with a blue sky overhead, a quiet river,
and then the rain came, the floods came,
the fires came, top soil blown away,
people came with their guns and greed,
the greed of people is only surpassed
by their ambition, not caring who dies,
they're maimed, arms amputated, minds
destroyed; the rich don't care about you,
they never did; the Green Belt desecrated
and monster houses constructed;
sold down the river, the big house,
the factory parking lot, the empty lot,
piss river a chemical soup,
the orange coloured sky,
earth that grows nothing,
you can dream all you want
you just can't take off this veil of tears;
believe nothing, the blight of the world
is too many people, soylent green;
the Anthropocene is cancer,
wars and propaganda,
history a commentary on a commentary,
lies piled on lies, it's become unintelligible:
the Anthropocene
is cancer on the earth.
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