Is it Time?
When the reserve gasoline burns and dregs of Starbucks evaporate,
The carburetor rattles to a halt and gas station buoys on the horizon,
The apocalypse creeps out the TV onto your barren heath,
Without crows or owls or markers of light or dark in a pyrrhic hearth,
Is it time to rest, I wonder. Time yet to stop the rush?
When bougainvilleas grey, bleeding cinders black to white,
Schools empty for processions of the dead, churches mute calls for help,
When a polar flood influx is here, 911 has no response to serve,
And the ocean tides slither underfoot, an Ouroboros animate at last,
Is it time to slow, I wonder. Time yet to pause the hoard?
When CFCs, monoxides and poison acronyms occlude your lungs,
The fireball overhead obliterates skin wars, and corroding rain pours
Down the sill of shambled catacombs, an acid bath for earthlings
Awaiting an annihilation painless, inured when the skies fall,
Is it time to reconsider, I wonder. Time yet to think for once?
When you fossilize in amber, faces contorted in silent howls,
Trees tumble down a coal mine live, euthanized martyrs for a tainted world,
An earth psychedelic, scorched with putrid wounds, burning,
Bleeding and dying as an ominous cloud hovers, overlooking the gore,
Is it time to die, I wonder. Time yet to quit every race?
When the ground mates with heaven and the darkest pits of hell,
Conspires with its offspring, harbingers of doom, playing you,
Pulling your strings, chipping your puppet limbs sliver by sliver,
And dropping you into the inferno fanned of your trespasses old,
Is it time for penance, I wonder. Time yet to repent in ruin?
© Arati Nair 2020
