Hand me my armadillo mandolin.
I need to sing.
Turn on the Transporter Machine to the moment
shimmering alongside this one.
Somewhere wind is trailing a wake of sunlight
through a hillside of spring grass. 
I see a sailboat leaning
under a bruised sky, so piercingly white
everybody’s stopped on the Embarcadero
peering over their steering wheel
trying to remember where they were going.

The smoke hasn’t gone away
this time, new fires are breaking out,
even in Oregon, and the fire season
is just beginning.
Ash flecks the cars, the leaves,
plumes of it, risen thirty thousand feet,
blocked out the sun, blocked the blue rays,
turned the air Martian orange.

In the City, fog darkens it even more,
streetlights still on. It’s like midnight
at noon. In the East Bay the sun
is a small, orange disc, a demonic Eucharist
rising from the region of civil war,
to hang over the battlefield in the dawn haze,
weeds and crushed dandelions
beginning to lift, in hesitant, springing upticks,
to waver over the bodies. One soldier is propped up
leaning against a tree as if taking a break
jaw slack, mouth agape,
ants passing each other along his lips
as if along a window sill, a man
in a 19th century book, now come back to life
sitting on a chair  holding a cardboard sign
next to a crooked blue tent under the overpass.

The air knows what has happened,
the answer no longer blowing in the wind.
The smoke doesn’t move.
We’re so divided now, it’s no wonder
civil war comes to mind. What can you do
in this bizarre light and toxic ash
but close the windows. Going out’s as bad as staying in,
everybody contracted to whatever channel
profits by reinforcing their opinion.

Our indulgence of inertia killing the earth
DMZ’s everywhere, poetry a dandelion
in the divider strip.

That an atmosphere of war pervades this poem
is appropriate, people shot in the back by police,
most generals afraid to speak out,
dictatorship nearly in place.
Nobody’s in control but a creep,
extolled as the Messiah, by mostly good people
bewildered by neglect and damaged
self-esteem, when what’s
really in control is the burning earth
and even now, I’m about to get in my car
drive across the bridge to meet someone
for coffee. We’re all complicit
in this march toward global extinction.
Inertia is a motherfucker.

Going outside now, the news says,
is like smoking eight cigarettes.
We’re a race of suicidal idiots
conditioned to band together in small groups
that circle each other warily, despise each other,
and we often don’t even know why.
Perhaps we mistake this huddling for love.

Romeo and Juliet are dead,
having dared to love, having finally united
their feuding families, the Capulets
with the hated Montagues, in mutual grief,
by killing themselves.

Where does that leave us,
who are still in love, from different tribes, still alive,
and still needing fresh air.   —SF, September, 2020