Upon Viewing "End of Suburbia"

August 11, 2006

The second semester I taught Composition II, which was
my first year as a real, professional teacher, I taught my
students Global Oil Peak Production, and the Hubbert predictions.
I asked them, during some minor diatribe of their Webquest,
(which few, if any read)
“Can our local economies support $6.00/gal of gas?”
It is now August, less than three years from that writing, and we
have seen $3.20 here in the upper Midwest, where our corn
is combined through tongs and our tongues subsidize sentiments,
a sloppy, steady slurping-up of the oil and the blood of our conscience.This land, the dirt I walk on and lay my head upon four floors from the ground, grouped and gathered in by the concrete and brick constructs splintered only by wood, is still the land of the whisperers.
Whispering while willow boughs bow before there presence, all that is still sighs in the silence of their grief.
Shit, we’re burning them up in our tanks right now;
shit, compacted way down there, dead dinosaur guts are but land lovers laid waste by some great flood or meteorite—
we’ve stirred your grave.
We stuck our big sticks, thick and phallic, into you; pumped and pile-dived your hive; your nest, full of sting and symmetry we stuck our sticks into your honey— pulled out gooey and oozing, gushed all over your tombstone.

They fucked up the Brits flight plans with liquid explosives. From what I hear, you had to taste baby food in front of the guards if you wanted to bring your kid and its food on the gazguzlin plane.
“They” want to fuck us up.
“They” want to bring us down.
“They” know it’s a matter of time before we suck all we can out of
this shriveled carcass (Car Gas = Carcass) and we move along…
Manifest Destiny. We’re sucking up everything in sight—we slaughter with mighty hands in the morning and
profess our soliloquies to the moon.
And if we listen to the resonant hum of eighteen wheelers and the gritty screech of break pads on rotors at intersections while smoking cigarettes above the city when all are asleep, we hear the echo of the soliloquies of millionsfrom thousands of years ago, only now making its return.
And under the hum, and in the whispers an epitaph for our era:
“Slowly moves the tortoise into her century and wisdom; a nation of dust beneath her feet.”