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A Little Bit More About All Of The Todays

           But I’ve never had heart failure. 
                                     —Henry Wei Lung

I read from a book that has listed as a description ‘an occupy
lyric’ and I remember being blindsided by my people, the ones 

who had been on my side, taking everything out on the police 
officers, bullying them as if to show we can play this game, too,

all of this directed at the women and men in uniform who daily 
risked their lives to protect my sorry ass and those asses of

all of the others.  Asses full sorrow, and police officers and 
an endemic problem that was decided by MY PEOPLE 

should be hate hate hated on bullied manipulated spit upon.
While those uninformed who attempted to contain, attempted

to safe zone, attempted to anti-violence.  I on the West Coast
bombarded with television snippets of my people taunting the

men in uniforms.  A visit from J from the East Coast, who
was telling me he believed he lost his poet cred because,

just like me, we could not understand and therefore stand for
and with Occupy This or That.  How could WE be the bullies?

we both wondered aloud, a bit slight in the eyes through which
could be discerned the stress, the denial, the loss of the ideal.

The officers looked on, mostly nice as pie.  Corruption, I have de-
cided is not an overused word.  It exists.  I have learned in a matter 

of three small years that to strike at the corruption at the heart of the 
heart of all hearts would be to kill the animal of all animals.  This

weary planet so-called Earth would finish harboring resentment for
those upright hairless beings that have nary an upright value.  Em-

pathy for Earth was always the problem, ironically.  It kept its creatures
alive, its population defiantly nabbing every ounce of dirt and bone

and sap.  Empathy was ruining everything.  Then, suddenly, 
like the monstrosity of the many leagues of stunning dinosaurs 

that had by now been long since forgotten by even sometimes
the Earth itself, our plural selves had mostly indulged us into an 

existence so arrogant, so unaware, so full of refusal - until Earth
saw us incapable of getting along with themselves.  Such fragile 

pricks, thought the Earth, so blistered with the memory that they
may have existed once, a mere hyperbole; and then, just as soon

as the parasites joined to coerce and to rule...they were decimated.  
No more gigantic gout-punched thundering clubfeet to extend or delay 

extinction.  The time had come and gone for dinosaurs, too.  Time 
had come for dinosaurs.  And then the dinosaurs left, saying goodbye

only in gasps.  Earth could not laugh, nor has it ever begun to even
find itself in any position in which to exhale with humor (like an

earth such as Earth exhales).   Save it for the porpoises to find 
out, Earth thought, deep within its incinerator, which cleared

many stages of ice.  Earth never laughs anymore.  Old
things just come undone.  And unempathetic pale and

upright creatures beat the Earth and the other pale and
upright creatures into the driest dust.  The dust of forget

me.  The dust of equanimity, equal once and for all, our
patriotism finally glowing, or even sparkling, as if tossed

with glitter, into the fog of all of the swamp-seeming 

fog-rolls full of nothing but bone mist.  The mists of bone.

An oxymoron or a paradox, were some of the things
that the remaining worlds were thinking (but not saying):

Truly, worlds never get to speak.  People did.  Yes, humans

used to talk.  But not anymore.  Now they exist merely

as the mist of bone.  I do not like any more of what I
see than you do.  My desiccated shadow lengthens.

Do you remember the Pacific?  Do you remember
wanting to swim to the other side of the planet,

floating upon its glorious waves like seemingly
healthy people somehow manage to do.  But

not anymore.  Now I can walk from here to the
islands in the middle of the Pacific, where, once,

nations pretended to end; now deserts begin. 
Words cannot float like people do.  Words just

remain in their place, ready to be frozen into
a mountain, rendered illegible, unable to ex-

plain that there was once pronunciation, once
the Pacific Ocean that covered incredibly vast

amounts of rich soil and contained three-quarters
of the inhabitants of the universe.  And now, Earth, Sun,

other worlds have no ideas (words) about existence; of the

humans who fantasized great power over all mysteries.