100,000 pounds of Vinyl chloride

Burned into the air
and in the water, with your fluoride

Today, we’ll demonstrate
the role that profit plays
in cost-benefit-analysis
to find the worth of YOUR lives.

Mind you,
We’ll be grading on a curve
That traces dead fish on the shoreline

Today the town of East Palestine
will know the skies of wartime,

wear the shoes of Palestine,
and know the smell of war crimes.

Their pets and livestock
will be corpses for the war shrine.

This is how you sanction all your farmland
in the Fourth Reich.

I’m honestly surprised
that Pete addressed it in a fortnight

Praised the first responders,
but ignored the looming morgue line,

like: “Focus on the cavalry,
Ignore that every horse died!”

“Never mind there’s not a single cricket,
bird,
or horsefly,
just triclops in the triage tent,
who expedite the four-eyed.”

Norfolk taking pages
out the Northwoods North side

Add a dash of NORAD,
plant a row of soil mines,
give them lots of black skies,
water bright with oil shine,
and you can propagate the kind of crop
that Gates will normalize.

Save your time,
and give up ever going back to ‘Normal Life’

Norfolk cut its costs
and now this nation pays the morbid price.

Norfolk weighed the loss as purely human,
so they rolled the dice
knowing Biden had their backs
when workers tried to unionize.

Knowing all their lobbyists
assured they won’t be scrutinized.

Knowing that the tiny little fine
they might be hit with
is a part of doing business
when your business is to euthanize.

To salt the earth,
Liquidate the brutalized,
Drench the plains in acid rain
and blame it all on rural minds.

Tell them that’s just what they get
for voting red
and old Team Blue will fall in step
and shake their heads
and disconnect from humankind

They’re never looking up,
their fingers point to you and I

Thanks to years of being trained
to frame the little guy

They’ve seen the film enough to tell you
where the blame should lie;

The poorest families’ EBT card was the mastermind!

Those little houses won’t concern
the liberal passerby

They had their dose of NPR,
The Passive-voice will Cast aside
Your raspy breath,
and swollen eyes,
Your burning cough that won’t subside,
Your cat that didn’t last the night,
That pall of death,
That blackened sky.

The harvest faced
in ten years’ time
that reaps the waste
of wealthy crimes.

A million-gallon-deep decline
Through supersites and party lines,
through hurried graves
and leaded pipes,
past poisoned slaves,
and slaughtered tribes,

past forgotten treaties
that we authored, then we compromised.

Past our moral fabric
ever brittle, gray, and fossilized.

Past the mass of plastic trash
that‘s just this side of ossified.

And if you find one root that thrives,
The living proof of fruitful vines,
Just hold it close,
take in the sight,
Don’t plant a host
for parasites
who, in the name of corporate gains,
see all that murder justified.

We’re such a waste of insect paste,
and SO much cheaper crucified!

We’re Children of the Fuselage!
Ghosts of all the food-deprived!
Echoes of the working-class
whose Kristallnacht was supersized!

Out in Ohio,
birds are drowning where they stand.

Their eyes reflect a world event
that devastates the land.

It’s a tale of regulations
disemboweled by profit’s hand
& Their viscera, that soaks,
like so much chloride,
in the sand.