The Blue Whales Have Stopped Singing

Reading by Tim Foley:

The blue whales have stopped singing
because the krill are vanishing
because the oceans are warming
because we are ruled by long-toothed liars
whose insides are full of dead leaves.

The great whales have gone silent
and my bird has gone blind
and there are chatbots in the basement
and corpses in the corn.

Under the overpass it is dry and still.
You would never know that everything is dying.
You should come and visit me.

Meet me over there under the sepia streetlights
with the strangleporn perverts and fentanyl fallen,
all the stillborn scar tissue extractions
from the wreckage of a banished womb,
the NAFTA-noosed factory towns full of deserted buildings
and the window-snarling meth towns full of deserted people,
where the cries of orphaned Palestinians mingle
with the cries of the last baby orangutan
ever born in the wild.

Meet me under the flickering lights.
Bring me some smokes and a sad luck story
and let’s stay up late by the freeway
watching the traffic get sparse.
Show me the spots on your skin
where life has kicked you
and I will kiss them
and give you a flower.

The leviathans have gone quiet
and the turbines are getting loud,
and everything has become so strange.
So sit with me on this curb
under my burlap wing
and let’s laugh
and heal
and mark beauty
until sunrise.

______________

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Large Blue Whale Off Southern California Coast Photo Don Ramey Logan.jpg from Wikimedia Commons by Don Ramey Logan, CC-BY-SA 3.0