Against the Future

Let me tell you the arithmetic of cities,

a count of consumers, tax contributors

male and female, on an abacus count two

people equal wallets

wallets mean commerce

commerce equals cacophonies

chimes on registers buying deterrence

lens swivels

world spins.

world turns over

sand drops down the glass

laughing knockabout tumbledown jest 

in ramshackle kitchens of ramshackle rooms, while 

the wind shudders once 

windows tremble

the half-life of happiness halving itself

Hurry!  

the fleet has sailed 

the abacus is broken

beads fall from its wires

on a cell phone count one, then zero, zero then one

let me tell you the arithmetic of cities

let me count salmon for you

let me count bears

polar bears under bombers overhead, above

submarines below

all moving in deterrence

because mingled strands of thought rewind to a slip knot

that lies easy on a wound

because words frame lies

cultures collide in mid-sentence

because each day swallows more from the stock 

in the cellar that may soon empty

when cell phones trigger our doomed destruction

due to unforeseen glitches or perhaps bloody

mindedness and global fires are extinguished by nuclear winter

remember all those taxes

all this bought and paid for long ago

like Venice

let me tell you the arithmetic of cities.

Dick Russell  Richard M Russell

                   2023