Owed to XL
Something irresistible
Drug from Canada
That must be some wick-ed shit!
What the “eh”
For the land of the free to be
Sold to the highest
Bitter
Everything must go!
“It’s going to happen anyway”
A juggernaut of lemmings
Full of subtle plunder statements
And generations of litter-gation
Brought a bout
By agitators wanting
Neither change nor dollars
Though perhaps
Some green back
And a few bucks
To run free
For if
Not
Just
Chain me
To the pipeline
To the prison
Of another’s drug habit
That makes cents for them
A million caliber fire arm
Into our vain
And heart land
Across to be borne
Again and again
Until we fine
The dose
That kills
It’s called “XL”
As we have a fit
For our over-sized ambitions
Though might
As well
Be one size fits none
Baggy pantsed gangstas
Stuffing their pants
With the stuff legends are made of
Getting under Mother Earth’s kin
And running out
Of patients
And ways to heel
Left in the mutter
There goes the neighborhood
Wondering if
There’s a belt big enough
To hold up
These fuels
I wrote this poem today, at the prompting of yet another fuel fool brandishing the inevitability of the XL pipeline and exploitation of the Canadian boreal forest tar sands strip mining. Even more shameful, it was a “scientist” claiming metaphysical inevitability. We don’t HAVE TO strip mine the earth of every fossil fuel to live a good life — in fact, destroying the earth is absolutely incompatible with the good life.
I’m sick and tired of people saying that the Canadian tar sands will be developed with or without the XL pipeline running through US. It’s just another lame version of the “If I didn’t do it, somebody else would” excuse for not taking responsibility for your actions. It’s not that complicated. If your actions are destroying the planet, then you have a responsibility to stop. Then, you can start working on changing the rest of the world. It may very well be the exact opposite of leadership to say that you won’t do something until everybody else does it. I might say that we’ve become a nation of sheep and lemmings, but that would be an insult to sheep and lemmings within whom the moral agency to save the planet does not reside! We can continue to kick the can down the road, but eventually, it will be Mother Nature kicking our can…
