Furthering Sanity’s Loss

The melt is no longer a warning,
it is an act already completed.
Ice older than cities liquefies at the rate of weeks,
Greenland hemorrhaging gigatons like an open artery,
seas lifting millimeter by millimeter
the way a noose lifts a condemned floor.
The math is settled; the calendar is not
on our side.

Mountains no longer remember cold.
Glaciers retract into photographs, then myths.
What drains downhill now is rot:
acidified runoff, thawed mercury,
the unburied breath of permafrost
belching methane with the patience of a bomb.

Rivers arrive too early, leave too soon,
and fields crack open like lips around bad prayers.

Storms are fed steroids of heat.
Oceans, saturated past fairness,
return the favor as drownings and erasures.

Fire seasons overwrite maps;
coral turns to bone before a generation learns its name.
Every fraction of a degree is a sentence passed,
not on the future, but on the present we refuse to admit is already dying.

Still…

The microphones hum.
Still the summits rotate speakers and excuses.
Words are recycled more efficiently than plastic,
each phrase a clean, bloodless loop of delay,
while a polar bear family sails past relevance itself,
balanced on a platter of dwindling ice,
adrift in a deadened sea,
encircled by the cyclic oration of impotence.