atlas tugged

earth is comprised of water, mud and metal

so is the human body. 

and as we pump pollutants into the air

we literally incorporate them, 

a singular ticket to where?

i’m in my prime and, 

unlike miss jean brodie, 

atlas tugged

people expand in space to take it all

when i just want to be so small

hitlerism is coming back 

and i’m as depressed as i am scared 

and i’m suddenly not sure, 

is everyone humouring me or not?

i’d just read primo levy’s masterpiece ‘the periodic table’ and was touched greatly by it. the vile inevitability of war, hatred and suffering, coexisting, always, with the fantastic beauty of the cultural world. as the bombs dropped, the poets worked on in the dark.

the culture war will exist forever. because there will always be the poetic and the curious on one side, and the bullies on the other side, who think that poetry is an affront to them, because they dare not try and understand it. and even now, when the bullies are fundamentally in control of america and the internet, they strike against poetry, and call us elitist, when all we are is a disparate mass trying to make sense of the hatred in the world, and imagine something nicer.