Orange is The New Blue

 

This is failure. Hill after smoldering hill rolls out,

Flame. The sky burns brown-orange. Look

Up: that roar pounding your ears—huge plane,

Stalling above? No, just flying too low, laboring

Heavy-laden: prisoners, weighted with fire

Gear. When rains come, they too bring ruin, dark

Stain rising in homes not consumed. This was not

Doom. Seems all it takes for apocalypse is us

Making mistakes we won’t fix. Under a fallen sky

Of ash we scurry masked, infected by the beasts

We crowd, crowding each other side by side

Because we haven’t met enough people who’ve

Died. Are you sick yet? I’m not. Odd, life that

Seemed so see-what-my-new-phone-does

Frivolous winds up, surprise, so serious,

And science—such a blur in school, that

Smelly frog—turns out so disrespectful

To what we’d prefer, making us not

Conquerors, but freaks, of nature. What

Creature fouls its nest, kills its own kind? If

The day breaks that lets us take off these

Masks, perhaps we’d best speak up, not like

The cop who’s scared to tell the bad cop:

Stop. Because the bailiff’s here, the jury’s in,

No joke, there’s smoke, there’s fire, this is

Failure. Look down: that small stream running

Over rocks, the one you love to stand and

Listen to alone—that tumbling warbling

Glistening rush is just the sound of water

Striking stone, blocked and blunted,

Flung-off, shattered, split, only to flow

Against, around, through, over, under—

On. I dip my hand into the cool, another

Plane flying above. The charred ash

That should mark my forehead as

A sign, the stream instead keeps

Trying to bear off, to clear, to

Pardon, to forgive, trying to

Carry far away, trying to

Bear it, trying, trying.