NEW POEM: The Earth and I

'The Earth and I' came out of a feeling of hopelessness for the planet and the consistent abuse of it by humans, including by myself. It also made me realise that these natural celestial bodies are so closely linked to humans, not only in terms of impact but in our destruction of self. It grew from that point to where it is now. I have a feeling that I may revisit this piece again.

The Earth and I

A Poem by Simon Clark

We have so much in common the Earth and I.

It’s easy to see.

We are both largely water. Water always finds, seeks into its own level. The Earth and I are two uneven shapes. Quite a task for water to balance, to find steadiness, its own equilibrium and explains why we both leak ideas, tears and pain at every turn. Turning, twisting, revolving, revolting and slowly dying daily, day-by-day, harm leads to harm

….

and humans are fucking us both. Scattering their shipwrecks beneath the wandering wavering wailing waves of its oceans. I leave the wrecks of my mistakes in the torn, tattered, tortured trauma of my tears. Both sunken. Eyes sunken. Hollowed out and recessed under my bent and beaten brows. Tired of staring at the drowning world I created (for me, myself and I) and the Earth around me drowning from the acrid water whacking against its skin.

We both have two Poles. North and South. South and North?

Depends how you look at it.

The South Pole scrapes its arse against the blanket of darkness, just touching it’s left buttock against the Southern Cross, leaving a groove, furrow, crease or crack in its skin revealing the soil underneath the white cocaine of snow that dusts and hopes to cool the ache of Mother Nature. Barely, hardly, fleetingly through that soil is seen, glimpsed, gleaned the blackness of coal – that hot Earth (bringer of flames)

…

and we are striking the fucking match. My feet are my Southern Pole. The balls and heels scraping along the broken shards of heart, the splinters from the bonfires of clothes and photos of love that once flourished, flounced and then floundered into grounded grains of salty stinging shanks of pain. I walk along as it grooves my soul. I burn along the coal.

The North Pole raises its smart black-silk hat to Polaris in greeting and that hat comes down torn, tattered, tortured, traumatised, trenched in the smog, smoke and stained in greenhouse gas, gangrene and grime. Icy rain pierces the fabric that wraps, rings and rounds the core of the Southern Pole. Those stalactite-like spikes spike the eyelids that balance on my head as it spins in insanity caused by depravity and leaves a cavity where once stood a brain long since riddled by the cocaine piles of my second youth. My fricative breath freezes on the breeze

…

and we are fucking melting it with our vibrations, vitriol and violence. The more we quake and shake and twist and turn, our true North becomes harder to find, discover – exploration of the soul like a crumbling bank of mountainous ice to the ever cracking, whipping, swirling water. Bubbling rage, bubbling fury, bubbling and babbling in distress. Caged.

We both get angry and erupt, spewing, spitting and spouting our ache.

I guess we do it differently.

Earth rages in anger (no management techniques here) and bubbles, doubles up its hurt and shakes the ground so that all the manmade buildings quiver, shiver and shock the single pavement piece into twos, threes and fours. Throw the innocent to their demise; despise the representation of species-takeover, makeover the ground to stun humans into submission. It’s a pause. A relative remission

…

and we keep burning those fucking fuels. Filling the firmament with fumes, pumping, pushing and pulsing into the once picturesque cloud-spattered sapphire sky. My disgust at the abuse of the creation (no damn God needed for that) bears its own relation to my degradation and imminent humiliation. As we purposefully push poison into the sand dunes like cartoons force-fed into the eyes (boring and gnawing) and minds of the vulnerable veterans of pregnancy. I pour another large drink, sink and swallow the pills and hope for the daylight, might and fight to carry on.

The world still turns.

© Simon Clark 2021