A Letter to Earth
Sometimes I wonder if you know what you’re doing-
the men born in your hospitals and homes are dying by grenades thrown by childhood friends
and you just carry on
spinning, spinning, spinning,
And while you spin, taking the moon with you
Those evil men in black suits and red ties
Are destroying you- they’ll let you die
If you don’t act fast. Keep yourself alive
And while you’re at it, save your sons and daughters too,
Because they’re out in the cold with no jackets
They’re being shot on streets
They’re pouring heroin into their bodies
Like there’s no tomorrow
But little do they know, for them, there won’t be.
How can you sleep at night, knowing all this goes on
And you just revolve around the sun
Spinning ignorantly
Waiting for your sons and daughters
To solve this alone?
But the world keeps spinning.
Dismay- as an arrow, directed at you, the target
Heading right towards your distrust.
Pierce those shifting eyes, those sweaty palms
Unthread the red ties you elected so
spew the gas of brotherhood.
Dismay- as a bullet, directed at you,
the shooters Who pump lead into blood-
and now they’re looking
For blood-
They didn’t have enough after it happened
and now every night, they curse your name.
War is such a crime that it has crime in itself.
But you don’t care. All you’ll do is reload your gun and shoot again.
Dismay- as a lie, directed to those who tell them the best
‘You’re doing great, you’re just fine’
Keep on destroying the country you love.
Keep on destroying the atmosphere that saves you.
‘We don’t trust you.’
Do something, or dismay will how like the blood from their bodies.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Bang.
Pour.
But the world keeps spinning.
Black man roams the street, needlessly nervous.
Dead midnight, it looks suspicious- but he isn’t
he’s just out for a late night snack.
They said he was out to kill the man.
He was innocent in the eyes of everyone else
But through those hateful pupils
He was a threat to justice- dead when he opened his front door that night. Poor, poor man. Don’t make those mistakes around here.
I guess policing is just a game of tag nowadays.
The badge denotes that they’re It,
Their skin denotes they’re not.
Now they’re afraid to walk the streets
Because they don’t want to be tagged in the skull.
This can’t happen anymore- because men like MLK
went sleepless nights fighting for their rights
to roam the streets like white men and even their white souls
those pure white souls, those angelic morals
if belonging to a black man
can’t escape a bullet.
Their mothers cry when they hear the news
And another gunshot rings far away
But this issue has not been solved.
She cries as he dies and she is informed and another is shot again
BANG! The explosive of reality in your head.
This is serious. Deal with it soon
Because now MLK is rolling in his grave, cursing his betrayers-
He worked for so long to gain their trust for his kind
But we left trust behind- threw it out
like the black bodies we lynched so long ago.
But the world keeps spinning.
Atmosphere slithers away like the snakes we are.
We slowly pour toxicity into its depths- our former shield
Once a knight in shining armor
is now a night of UV rays.
As days become warmer we become colder
shun the facts of the world
call it a hoax but it’s more true than you are
and all we’re doing is watching it happen.
All we’re doing is not helping- put aside empty threats
launch your missiles not
and focus on the ice caps. We put on our caps
and hide from the world’s horrors- but how will you feel
when there’s no world to hold them?
Why can’t we focus on this issue-
All the world at once Set aside political values
and turn our powers towards the climate?
How can we turn our eyes away from the damage done a
nd away from the solutions here?
Abominable- curse us for not looking into air, or water,
Or solar, geothermal- anything that’s not carbon
not destructive like this!
Curse us for our stubborn ignorance- our unwillingness
To change If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,
but it’ll break us one day.
These thoughts circle the world as we walk idly round
taking pictures of these oddly finite towns
tweeting about how terrible it is
but yet doing nothing.
But the world keeps spinning.
But not for long. Soon
If it keeps bleeding
If we keep shooting
If we keep polluting
And if arrows are still needed
We will no longer be around to see it spin so.
So clean up your acts, o men and women
Boys and girls!
Much has been done wrong in this world!
Such fools are we to think we cannot be fixed
And with a helping hand- or a helping 8 billion-
We can soon become the men who we once dreamed of.
The men who we dream of now.
The men we will look back in pride on-
But the world
Keeps
Spinning.