the news in poetry

Everything wants to explode.
These cities,
these trees,
there’s you,
there’s me,
there’s the very atoms in your bones.
Everything wants to explode.

The bad news is:
nothing makes sense anymore.
The good news is:
nothing ever did,
you were just fooling yourself before.
We were all just fooling ourselves.
This isn’t new
this is very very old.
Everything wants to explode.

There is the possibility
the world ended years ago
but our shared denial was
simply more powerful than reality itself.
And it kept us off the shelf
until now.
But the pollution in the rivers
from looking for car-slaking black gold
it’s catching on fire
causing earthquakes in Montana.
Everything wants to explode.

As long as the courts
keep giving the bad cops
a de-facto license to kill
by never prosecuting their murders
then the fact there are some good cops
doesn’t mean a goddamned thing.
The sucking chest-wounds of our nation
that drug-store band-aid couldn’t hold.
All this fracking now
the underground is cracking,
everything wants to explode.

The dying bees
the riot nights
the preachers their teeth gleaming bright
the teachers fired for not scoring right
the innocents in laser-sights
a society on overload
everything wants to explode
everything wants to explode.

But maybe,
when this is over.
We can build something better.