Part 1

Climate Theory

Steve Benson

The World 

The world needs poetry          Because

Of       Climate changes

Because rich people have too much

And poor people have too little

             Money and power 

We are all living it                On the brink or

Or on the blink                 Very hard

To reconcile                    We fear we will

Collapse in grief                   Explode

With rage        Lose our bodies’ ground

Adjusting               To knowing

Personally

How little we can save     ourselves

      much less the rest of the world

              we seek to love

Fear     interferes

with compassion

and imaginative vision

Fear stoked enough precipitates rage

Walls, Dehumanization, Hatred, Violence

Violence, hatred, dehumanization, walls

while the internet has turned us

        into crazed or faulty robots 

"Change" has spread right through us

increasingly, i am enraged at all the plastic

i must buy along with the food and tools i buy

at any store but a boutique reeking

of bourgeois evasions

there is no way out of complicity with

this sabotaging of our children's children's

and their friends' friends around the world

health and sanity

if only i didn't lose things, i wouldn't

have to replace them right and left

but i can't figure out where they went

why the cursor jumps up a few lines

and continues to keyboard there. is it trying

to be a language poet? it doesn't accept discipline

it doesn't theorize, it doesn't get product to market

don't change the subject

everything distracts me

anything is refuge from my howling rage

where did i put that poem

i was hoping or trying to write

i read articles and papers about the psychology of facing climate change

look at photographs of people i find beautiful and imagine them

as real

as i read other articles and papers about mental health in palestine

       and now ukraine

until i can't bear to read any longer or write or listen to words

i can barely hear music

                                             what is this?

just writing down what words represent as thoughts and feelings

articifial intelligence is spelled AI no need to spell

     dehumanized humanity itself

people are dispensible

every day of this [madness] costs lives

causes harrowing grief

switches tracks to illness, trauma, brutalities

i get sick of feeling taken up with information about these things

an illness not yet in shrink-raps

at some point

i can't read online

We must not any longer do

that which we have always been doing

...

the climate catastrophe well underway displaces humans from their homes -

   a few here from a tornado or hurricane - a few more there from flooding -

quite a few then from fires - but already massive migrations desperate to survive

conditions that frustrate agriculture and hunting practices people have relied on

   for generations. there will be

loss of the nature and recognizability of ecosystem environments that humans

   and birds and newts, whales and otters, bees and squirrels

have depended on as long as any can recall - our homes

   currently threatened, whether cognitively observed or just felt

in the bones, these displacements constitute a genocide

  against living beings, including humans and trees and mosses

that kill us

                         Try prosecuting Shell and Chevron over this

The horror and the terror must

       affect everyone human at least for sure

leading to unforeseeable dynamic acceleration of the onsets

   of severe mental illness and behavioral disregulation,

much of which is likely to be violent, coercive, and occasion

    further loss, grief, and hideous demise, undercutting

capacity to care                                                 to share

To live with that is to be at risk perpetually night and day

    of the central nervous system's sympathetic response demands

         Please plan ahead not to go mad, to suicide, to vandalize,

    or get yourself addicted to something to relieve you

        of any actionable acknowledgement and analysis

what's happening in and around each and all of us

what patience will we need to find while changing everything

    to meet changes underway       where they're at

When the ground is no longer recognizable,

   but known to be lost, irrecoverable, nowhere,

       how will we ground ourselves?

Put that in your artificial intelligence and smoke it