Turning and turning in a plastic gyre

The Garbage Patch grows silently.

Things fall apart, degrading into plastic pills and

Floating Barbie heads are loosed upon the world.

The plastic-dimmed tide concentrates in filter feeders.

The innocence of tossing bone over shoulder

Should have died with the Neanderthals.

The best want more stuff, while the worst

Slave hopelessly, for the same petroleum dreams.

Surely this thing should make the papers?

It’s bigger than the Second Coming!

But the Second Coming is fodder for series novels,

Televangelists, and lame excuses.

When I close my eyes to sleep, the ocean pours in and

My head fills with bleached coral, flotsam, and decay.

Headless, eyeless and without pity for seabirds,

Trash vortexes are here to stay.

The darkness should be my refuge but,

Hundreds of years of industry

Have born this nightmare, hid from us

By Commerce, who puts Nature second,

That rough beast performing miracles

Daily, of air and water and sustenance.

Who could sustain the guilt we should feel?

Who, but the Greens, gives a flying dodo?

When in hot water, Flat Screen Man will ‘reset,’

Invoking some planetary cheat code

Like easy-peasy carbon sequestration.

We play with Earth as if any day,

A new one could be born.

By Maaja Wentz

I wrote this poem years ago for my critique group buddies but when I saw it fit the latest of Chuck Wendig’s weekly writing challenges, I couldn’t resist posting it here.

Live Reading of Second Coming plus speculative fiction stories and poems

If you would like to see me read this and other poems and stories on video, watch this clip of my reading at Can-Con, one of my favorite annual events.  Beware, may contain horror, and Dionysus.

Can-Con is the Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature, a literary and scientifically-minded science fiction and fantasy convention in Ottawa held annually by The Society for Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature.