The Rare Earths by Dave Shortt

deeper into the interior,
vanishing exclusive rights & claims
on my darling Clementine's mind,
her 'spiritual shareholdings'
bamboozled by primal hordes
quietly flowing in superundercurrents of consumer plunder, of
googles of evolving visions in recreation

raw promethium victories over national armies
are swapped on the market
disguised variedly as 'free'
in integrations of creation's Bluechip
moving between desirous technopop chart peaks proving
funk disaster avoided, CD warehouses left dry
& heated

this was the scandium idea:
develop everyone's deepest internal lode
of egolessness-expertise,
a theory of richesse in universal application
convulsing the standard of living throughout belt-tightened dockyards,
recalling unscientific polemic of saints,
causing trembling in animus prophecies cast down
from cooling towers of fission salvation

to each then his own experience
of the atoms' Poverty, till nothing's
recovered from the cavernous mineshaft
leading down beneath 'great things,'
beneath innocent dark roots of trees,
& kiss from then on
every bit of venture capital goodbye,
even what surfaced as a ringtone
embedded in an abundant supply of friends,
who were changed to mythless strangers:
loved ones: strangers:
loved ones: strangers:
flickering on & off around the clock (in radioactivity),
angstrom'd colors black-lit with angst

meanwhile one G20 goal was to put a yin landscape into space,
where yuan geology & new disneyfied avatars
would attract tourism of a shrinking point of view:
while haves & have-nots might sleep
with phobias stuffed into their pockets
with their childhood tors if they're lucky

'more abstraction,' more abstraction
is talked about, like
'beautiful w*m*n'  still coming from inside the earth?
the close-packing laser gazes
& 'hard-to-get' magnetic attractions
that come to critique the polarity
of 'm*n's creations'?
(as a few chemists arrive to interview per usual
the unsmelted & unstable love-at-first-sight
in advance of being handled & crushed)

did weathered Frigg & Odin
leave them as concessions to human invention
in a birch-covered archipelago
when the gods disappeared into tailings?
when finally earth's bloodletting instinct suffocated,
down below?

earth, picked apart scientifically into give-&-takes,
original creature comforts, therapeutic blood draws,
unified redemptive clots,
(like reincarnated myths)
partially encrypted in shell 4f:
where once upon a time,
donor plasma gets squashed?
lumps of aerospace get strewn?
along a road leading to another vestige
of habitable-planet luxuriance?

Dave Shortt is a longtime writer (from the USA) whose work has appeared over the years in a number of print & electronic literary-type venues, including The Ekphrastic Review.  More of his poems can be found in recent or archived issues of Blaze Vox, Blackbox Manifold, Ygdrasil, Peculiar Mormyrid & the print anthology Emanations: Chorus Pleiades. Silver Pinion published two of his poems earlier this year, & another was posted this summer in Amethyst Review.