☀ Today's Poem: "["It's image salad," says the yellow-billed cuckoo. Fair enough. Let's check in on the Agencies:]" Betsy Andrews

"It's image salad," says the yellow-billed cuckoo. Fair enough. Let's check in on the Agencies:
Department of State? Obedient walrus. Pats its head and rubs its belly,
balances a globe on its fishy nose, buttering up the popcorn crowd of Arctic explorers
sweating in their fancy pants, perspiring all over Finland, Finland politely ahem'ing.
It's 84 degrees Fahrenheit at 64 degrees north, and the Interior Secretary is yawning,
"I haven't lost any sleep over it." He's snuggling into his slippery sheets
with their 415 ppm thread count, the midnight toads' bassooning,
the sexed-up mosquitos' falsetto lulling him into a carbon dioxide fantasia,
where Anne Sexton in her white fur coat guns the engine in modernity's garage,
hands him a vodka martini. Fuming over a panda cam focused on nothing but nothing at all,
the President issues a trigger warning: "They could cut a hole in it, dig under it, climb over it,"
his goosebumps pornographic, while the EPA feigns an asthma attack and ducks out of Algebra II.
It's an ace in the hole on a golf course in Greenland, a serpent coiled in a bluebird box.
"It's gold and diamonds and fishes galore, a new arena for competition, new opportunities,
new threats, a new age of strategic engagement. It's real estate!" gargles Department of State,
salivating all over the bit in his mouth. Treasury stuffs his skinny arms through the loopholes
in the kiddie floats, jack-knifes into the crypto-currents of the continent's waterlogged flood maps,
clutching an invitation to a heated pool party where the guest list is confirmed as a matter of rote,
and fuck all conflicts of interest. Bureau of Land Management, going in for the kill,
stalks a couple of underaged hikers, flings them into a coal seam in the bingo-hall hills of Wyoming,
and the President fluffs his pompoms with a "Push 'em back, shove 'em back, way back!"
Science collapses in a heap on the field. It's the history of chlorpyrifos plagiarized
by an influencer with a toxic thumbprint and a handle swiped from a nightclub
masquerading as the mystery in a packet of seeds, a moon-pie meditation with a 401K
piled atop the neighborhood's neck-snapping reversals, like we're standing under a falling tree,
which is falling falling for a long long time, falling all the goddamned way down,
the last falling tree in the universe, and nobody acknowledges the sound