Poem for the Anthropocene

There's good news

And bad news and

Sometimes it seems

They are one and the same

As Shakespeare once said

You can always take

Comfort not yet being dead  

But it's the same whirlwind

That keeps reappearing

Ominously overhead

Peak ignorance

Peak bliss

Is a Vaudeville routine

And the cognitive dissonance

Doesn't ever get

Any better than this

Present convergence

Of knowing and not

It's like being kept on hold

Endlessly by customer service 

Unsure whether the outage is local

Or civilization is that much

Closer to total collapse

Like a solar collector on a cloudy day
We all have lots of excess capacity
Just waiting around for

Sunnier days up ahead

But we'll never really 

Generate much positive energy
If the doom loop keeps playing
Inside our head