Some Awful Amorphous Moby Dick Full of Malice

Here's James Kuntsler this week on the oil spill in the Gulf. And I wrote a poem about the situation there today. Him first, then me. And if you want to be cheered up. Don't read either.

     Meanwhile, a giant oil blob lies quivering in deep waters off the Gulf coast, like some awful amorphous Moby Dick full of malice waiting to sink Pequod America -- or at least the economies of five states. A few months from now, the BP corporation will wonder why it didn't go into something safe and predictable like the pants business instead of oil exploration. They will surely question the viability of conducting future business anywhere near the USA, and the USA will enter a wilderness of soul-searching about the drill-baby-drill strategy that only a few scant weeks ago seemed to be a settled matter. Tough to have your future hoped-for energy supplies evaporate at the same time that your hopes for future prosperity get sucked into a black hole.

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Fiddler Crab: Uca Pugnax Reflects on the Gulf Oil Spill 

Capricious and rapacious,
humans are a pain in the carapace
for any self-respecting crustacean.
Would we could stop fiddling
around with them altogether.
They mean to kill us all. 

Alas, decapods are cursed by God.
Quite catchable he made us.
Numerous, too, and tasty.
Every last one of us.
Humans shell out big bucks
for my lobster cousins.
Crazy Cajuns
boil our crawfish relatives,
eat ‘em by the bushel.
And our shrimp brethren,
well, you know what happens to them.
Two thousand species, and somebody’s
eating every one. 

Bad enough: all this chomping up
on us and our family.
We are tough. Foul our sands
with your mounds of rubbish,
cast  your crap into our surf,
trawl us by the trillion . . .
we survive. 

But spew gushers of foul black poison
into our homes, into the cracks and crevices
of our crabby lives . . .
no way we claw our way back: 
that's Auschwitz without ovens.