Creative Output

It seems to be true that the world is in debt.

If I take from you then I won’t see it yet.

By nature we crave to spend more than we earn;

we’ve money to save and we’ve forests to burn.

We’ll use up the rest, extradition’s deferred;

we’re draining our nest-egg and killing the bird.

Their species are dying, and so are our own,

but let’s just keep flying, it’s fine in our zone.

Let’s use all the oil and eat all the fish,

abuse all the soil and do as we wish,

ignore all the damage that we cannot see;

Perhaps it hurts you but it doesn’t hurt me.

In Earth’s final hour, we won’t fear the night;

if we have the power, we’ll turn on the light.

I haven’t made much of a fuss about it so far, but as well as playing cards, each week is supposed to be inspired by a letter of the alphabet. This way I get through the alphabet twice with each deck of cards. For the ace I decided the A on the playing card itself was enough, for the two of spades I made the woman’s name Bea and used the tag ‘2♠B or not 2♠B’ to go with the suicide theme. 

This week I actually thought about the letter C. The first thing it makes me think of is carbon, an element which has had a lot of attention recently due to carbon dioxide’s role in climate change. But this being only the most popular symptom of general over-consumption and destruction of the environment in general, I wrote a poem on that wider topic. I wrote a separate poem on the three of spades. 

I started off writing it as a sonnet, since I wrote one (of no literary value) early this morning and remembered how much I liked them, but then I figured out I could have a mid-verse rhyme with nest-egg, and changed it to whatever you call anapestic tetrameter which is missing an unstressed syllable at the beginning of each line. I don’t think extradition is the right word though, I’ll find it eventually. The idea to stuff all these extra rhymes in was probably influenced by my increased exposure to Jonathan Coulton’s ‘Still Alive’ recently. I just love some of the rhymes in that song.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the rhyme, rhythm, and reason of this one, although I have to admit I didn’t particularly plan it from beginning to end, I just wrote fairly disconnected couplets with the rhymes I found. I could probably come up with more.