Wide open flaming mouth of dragon,

Rising feathered wing of phoenix,

fly into the flames of your nightmares 

and expand there, for we can only change

when what has encased us perishes…

and so a madness spreads through the mind

of a landscape too worn down by industry,

disease, money-making, and the viruses

of animals penned too long in tract homes.

The earth itself seethes, and rivers run dry,

hardened mud cracks where plants grew

and fires begin to roar from man’s creations,

the cigarettes, campfires, bullets, ignorance,

 and more than can be contained any longer flame

from sheltered canyons, the dried dead trees

flaring suddenly upward and laying their smoke

and ash across a countryside grown hot

as the iron of its machinery driven lust.

It is a hot, hard grind, and homes are lost

and lives are lost, and each year the cost is greater.

A civilization cannot contemplate its coming end

when its leaders’ lungs are filled with the ash

that remains from its dreams and odysseys.

They cannot plan when their lungs are filled with death.

I have seen it all, from the faintest flicker of grass fires

to the cascading walls of flame surrounding mountain towns

cut off from the highways that were their birth

to the raging ovens of flames that come for all…

the deer, the moose, the squirrels, the mountain lions,

all that is innocent, and man in his ignorance.

The earth is more immense in its little part of the cosmos

than all the bombs we have dropped in all our wars.

And there are rules of physics and matter and mortality

that are understood by water and rock and mass

and absence itself in the mystery of space that are not

in the understanding of the imperfections we call life.