Poems

Syllables for Sustainability

Cages

Rats are rodents, and should not be confused with passive followers of a dictator.

Empires

Short version: as long as imperial ambitions exist, we must resist and persist, avoiding the extinction of humanity.

Nowhere

The lawns are burning, the houses are burning, and the asphalt roads are melting; nowhere to hide, nowhere to go; a crow is singing intensively; an unsustainable society is disappearing before our eyes.

Friends

What have I left behind? What will I need? Who will I meet? Snowflakes are falling, touching my skin, covering my hair, keeping me awake.

Change

Lack of empathy is killing us, but no one is born a killer. Is it possible to change direction, possible to change through love?

Power

For sure, global peace will not come easy, but it will never come if we continue to enable the centralization of power.

Peace

No to war; no to genocide; no to military-industrial complexes.

Love

And now the armies and navies must be turned into something radically better.

Boats

Big men and their big ships: these ships are not made for system change; these ships are military means, not obsolete artifacts of a demilitarized world. The ocean is on fire, the men are drinking, and the ships are drifting.

Plastics

Plastics in the air we breathe; plastics in the water quenching our thirst; plastics in the food we eat; waste of a society praising capitalist production in the blood; we swim in the ocean, seeing nothing but waste.

Emergency

This is an emergency call; this is a state of planetary emergency; this is a call for planetary revolution.

Fire

When the forests are burning, the glaciers are melting, and the "global leadership" is "restructuring", it is time to reclaim power, time to stop the arsonists, and time to make sustainability a reality.

Soil

Soil contamination and soil sealing, your daily experiences; past and present mistreatment, your future in the making; forgotten, raped, tortured, treated like waste; only a soil revolution worth its name to join.

Water

Water in motion; rising, falling, flowing, circulating, changing form; giving hope.

Means

Means of production; means of consumption; means of computation. Who controls the means?

Shell

End the doublespeak, end the irrationality, liberate the truth; crush the shell.

Fascism

If fascism starts with trimmed lawns and repeated lies, anti-fascism must be about spreading seeds of wildflowers and about telling the truth.

Products

We meet them almost everywhere: products that distract; products that disrupt; products that destroy; made in a capitalist society.

Strangers

We are strangers in a strange place: zeros and ones that distract us, keep us all awake; trackers that follow our movements wherever we go; digital assets of private companies; advertising that reveals what we are.

Violence

If men's violence is a means of organizing society, reproducing structural inequality, anti-violence must be about blocking every attempt to silence, every attempt to normalize.

Enablers

Lying, hiding, deceiving, harassing, mismanaging, openly supporting white supremacy; representative plutocracy.

Meltdown

Indeed, they are very rich men and do what they please; yesterday, they left the planet.

Smiles

Open the cage, liberate the hen; end the cruelty, end the war; revive, revive.

Clay

We liberate ourselves by preserving life on this planet; we liberate ourselves by stopping the killing; we liberate ourselves now.

Leaves

Still falling, covering the ground; already organic matter, already digested by worms; teaching us to love, keeping us alive.

Capitalism

Deforestation, contamination, desertification, ecological devastation, and definitely not what we need.

Chains

Global supply chains, global value chains; chains of lifelong exploitation, chains of systemic destruction; webs of full-blown liberation.

Breathing

Now we can finally revive the revolution, ending violence, ending racism, ending oppression; now we can begin to breathe.

Holes

Coal, oil, tar sands, fossil gas, fracking, deep-water drilling, open-pit mining, unconventional ways of raping the rocks; stop killing us.

Pandemic

Shifting goals, shifting strategy; restoring revolutionary responsibility; energy from below, from living systems, from the sun; what had to be done, was finally clear; moving beyond capitalism.

Coronations

Capitalist food production and a new virus; destroyed habitats and a human host; upside down, inside out; locking down and holding out; death and suffering; profit and inequality; business as usual.

Cars

Where life ends: impervious surfaces, pollution, and lost habitats; death cages, death cages, death cages abound. The species are gone now.

Decades

Now we know that we must heal the ecological rifts, that we depend on you; time for rebellion and time for struggle, high time for revolution; in solidarity with you, a planet somewhere in this galaxy.

Humanity

Peace rebels; lifelong creators; associated individuals; social revolutionaries; united emancipators; radical democrats; ecological producers; communalist human beings.