We are elephants climbing trees
Heaving great piles of words against the tide
Watching them wash away, horrified
Hurling weighty thinkpieces into the flood
As if our grand thoughts can stop brute protoplasm
The pen may indeed be mightier than the sword
But not the cudgel
The blunt stone against the head of civilization
That which is built can be burned
Anyone making anything new
Only breaks something else
Have we, in fact
Been building the world’s biggest bonfire
All this time
And now
Seeing such a stack of tinder and fuel
We cannot help ourselves
From setting it alight
I suppose I thought
For too long
That we were building something else
A library
A storehouse of wisdom
A springboard from which to transcend
And become more than we started from
But alas
Nature calls to us
The animal DNA deep inside
Whispering
Dominate, trample
Take, use
The world is a tool
Made only for us
Our sharp minds, nimble hands
We were made to unmake the world as we found it
And we do
Day by day
Until there is no world left to mold
No oxygen to breathe
No fish to eat
No defense against our darkest selves
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I cry, with the sages of old
Knowing what they knew
That my island is illusory
The bully laughs and lights another match
Read this, he says
And the world is given back over
To the beasts
Perhaps, in the end
A bigger brain is not a survival advantage
Let the cockroaches have their day
Unless we have the stomach
To make our pretty words into swords
If we do not
Well
We had a good run