"this is sixth form poetry, not Keats or Yeats"
Leaky pipelines cannot excuse The vileness of your touch As it seeps malevolently From its ancient, grainy prison; Your eccentric composition Creating chemical fingerprints That dance lightly across the Soft and drifting breeze, Masking your toxic presence To finger innocuous fields Of rice and herded scapegoats With the legacy of …
Illegal logging in community forests, Oil drilling in indigenous territories, Mining concessions in native soils, These have become our warzones. Activists hailed as terrorists, While global agribusiness is Paraded as unchallenged And unchosen liberator. Forever on the right side of progress; Writing its history With cheques, And laws, And body …
Browsing through the foliage You selectively suppress The spindly growths of youth, Maintaining gaps of light Through frequent visitations To clumsily prune each trunkful Of frail and wasteful biomass. Ungainly gardeners of this Fragile, jaded home, Your disturbances reshape Wooded structures and Buried thickets; Shearing lively brushes As you …
In sweltering swamps, you seethe And sweat. Shedding layers to Acclimatise to the rising heat, Learning to bask in the warmth Of its embrace as you spread Invasive tendrils to test the Boundaries of your habitat. Your colonies have not entered Our consciousness. Hiding behind the certainty of …
Ancient submerged volcanoes Rise up from the ocean floor, Their tips littering the landscape As tremendous shadows of the past Cast a barely visible film of filth Across this false Pacific paradise. Where Spanish conquistadors Once prowled the dunes, Scintillators now sweep across the sands, Combing beaches for dirty treasures …
You sleep beneath a throbbing blanket, A whining drone that cuts through the night Like a monotonous call to prayer; Serrated sounds that test the edges Of your chemically-reinforced cocoon. Draped in treated fabric you drift restlessly; Your dreams a kaleidoscope of apprehensions, Where walls run red with shattered husks, …
Beneath the dewy grass you seep, Wispy tendrils splayed out as complex Networks of finely-woven threads. Breaking through the earthy tomes Your tempting fruits throb buoyantly; A myriad of insignia that litter the landscape, Revealing your presence in cascades of colour. We map the subtleties of your tone, Decomposing this …
A sharp aroma seeps across the sky, You scurry to its source; Working quickly to carefully craft A sustaining sphere of pungent spice. With cargo now in tow you Castoff across this barren sea In direction unknown, Until looking up You catch your breath And ride the Milky Way; Stars …
From buried cracks And open wounds Shrouded scales Begin to seep. Cutting across murky waters Into buried memories And forgotten half-truths, Inky fingerprints Preserve their presence Alongside court proceedings And local weather reports. Over time these sightings Are recalled as prophecies; Portents of the restless Earth That slyly secrete themselves …
Your barren canvas stretches Tightly across forgotten states; Caught between unforgiving waves And starry mountain peaks, Your pulse beats unhurriedly In this hibernation of solitude. Permafrost litters your landscape: Continuous, Discontinuous, Sporadic. Its frozen core A hard border to Fertile soils and Future disturbance. But as the ice begins …