Tuesday poem #446 : Paul Pearson : Tzara The Great

 

 

Over 1 billion animals feared dead in Australian wildfires,
           experts say
                           - USA Today, January 8, 2020.

this is not:
            art
            rhetoric           
            history
            metaphor
            propaganda
            allegory
            fashion            

this is:
           disaster

so take off your clothes:
           fashion
so take off your hair:   
           allegory
so take off your skin:
           metaphor
so take off your flesh:
           history
so take off your voice:
           rhetoric
so take off your eyes:
           art

stand there in your bones that shabby shambling rack you’ve been dragging around

stand there in your calcium in your skeleton in the one thing that makes you the same as me

stand there in your stone in that which you've leached from the earth

stand there in your ivory in the one thing we share with every other living thing through every creature that has ever verted and will never brate again

stand there in this incontrovertible extinction

stand there and weep for what you have done

this is:
            the end
           Tarzan

and you are:
           the author

stand there and:

 

 

Raised in a mining town in the mountainous back-country of southeastern British Columbia, Paul Pearson now lives in Edmonton where he lives and writes with his wife and two children. He has worked as an arts administrator in the non-profit sector and spent nearly two decades with the Government of Alberta and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts before making the jump to Municipal government administration in 2018.

Paul has been heavily involved in the literary arts community in Alberta for more than 20 years. He is the co-founding editor and chapbook designer for the Olive Reading Series and a current board member of the Edmonton Poetry Festival. His poems have appeared in Descant and Event, and the anthology Writing the Land: Alberta Through Its Poets from House of Blue Skies. His debut collection, Lunatic Engine, was published by Turnstone Press in the fall of 2020.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan