The Mountain
2007
It is not for a lack of caring.
My generation is not apathetic.
We can be provoked to feel emotion – video games, movies, money most importantly.
Action is what we all are lacking.
With lives based on convenience, those two steps become a mountain.
Will you sign this petition?
Just two steps, it’s for Darfur.
But the mountain, two steps, towers over us.
It glowers, insurmountable, and we cower.
Maybe another time, we say.
Heads bowed, we turn and walk away.
Adding inches every minute, the mountain smiles.
Someday it will rise to heaven and then where will we be?
Screwed.
The problems of our age will overrun us.
They will scale the mountain that we built
and pound at heaven’s door.
And the doors to salvation will become gates of iron
locked.
Protecting those already within.
Maybe, angels will fly out preemptively
and drop bombs of shame and fire on the earth?
Maybe God, old and tired, will cry for us.
His son already died for us
now what can he do?
And from the depths of hell, Satan will smile a toothy smile.
With skies of red and ash,
the earth is rotting from the middle.
In her sickness she shakes to warn us —
Listen! Anyone!
she cries with acid tears.
But her sickly tears are not enough to quench her cracking skin
and she cannot see through smog-filled eyes.
Three dollars for a gallon of gasoline?
It’s ok,
we’ll get more from Alaska.
And when that’s gone, we’ll rape the Arctic
and drain our mother’s blood.
To save our mother, our father cries and cries in heaven
but behind locked gates,
he drowns in his own tears.
And Satan laughs.
Don’t look at that tree hugging hippy- she has cooties.
Will you sign this petition?
We turn our keys and start our engines.
The mountain grows a little more.