pushed to the margins
hanging on by one stressed thread
to toxic or barren fringe-lands

when the once-verdant centres could, and did, hold

us, all/

“Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

while now, all about it

“reel shadows of the indignant [shore] birds”

harkening

one day soon, you too, will be residuum here

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An ephemeral asphalt pond after heavy rains in the parking lot of an abandoned mall, long-infested with gulls, as testimony – not merely to the inorganic evolution of consumerism, but of the intersection of NAFTA and other free-trade agreements, American soft segregation and hard apartheid, and the inherent discriminatory and predatory migration of US and Western global capitalism.

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at least 47% of the global population lives on precipice of – or beneath the so-called poverty line,

living on remnants and ruins of what’s left,

on what the gluttonous parasitic minority and their complacent petit bourgeoisie – the politically loyal, financially stable through direct wage theft and secondary profit-taking from workers, environmentally careless and socially duplicitous – and ever upwardly aspirational

have begrudgingly consented to leave for them — scraps, pittance paystubs and scabs; landfills and sewage; french fries and cigarettes;

and, they are every bit as beautiful, as worthy, as Earthling, as these gulls