This poem is about human destiny. Usually, if your destiny looks bad, you might want a destiny check, maybe adjust your outrageous sense of self-importance. Most of us will fall in love with the wrong people, ruin ourselves with worry and self-destructive activities, and die forgotten. That’s fine. I like it.
I have a Plan B destiny, because the one under my saddle is an old, tired nag with a sway back, no teeth and mange. The history books will continue to focus on stories that satisfy the market, and, according to destiny, the market is awful, just like us, just like my glue factory destiny. I had been trying to ride off in the sunset on a proud horse of destiny, but I have discovered how I can trot alongside a mule destiny from the long dark night of Destiny A into the sodium street lamps of Heartbreak Acres, the purgatorial working class eternal twilight haunting the parking lots of desire in Destiny B, the place where dreams go away after a brief transaction with the well-lit world. There are only so many carrots, only so many horseshoes to go around. Life is a diminishing return.
What if some of us were destined to die on an alien planet, to grow old and die that our grease and water mingle with foreign, sterile elements. That would be like a Plan B, but on a Planet B. Oh, to die forgotten on new soil bombarded by captured asteroids until enough metal could be sent to its core to generate the bowshock of a magnetosphere to protect our mutant, gasping descendants. After millions of years, our hydrocarbons meet again under tons of slowly writhing rock embedded with heavy metals seething with alpha and beta and aloha particles?
‘If only we had used coal to create greenhouse gasses to trap heat on the Red Planet,’ our descendants will moan. ‘What if we had used clean coal technology like our wise ancestors suggested?’ I wonder….
Mars InSight touched down
Without coal technology,
Global warming fail.
Fifty State Banana 