Poetry Break: "The Fullness of Time"

Earth

"I'm so dizzy,

my head is spinnin' . . ."

(Image from Wikipedia)

I thought that I'd posted this old poem before, but I didn't find it listed in "Poetry Breaks: Some of My Poems," so apologies if I've previously inflicted this bit of doggerel on readers:

The Fullness of Time

High clouds come crashing to the ground; rocks drift
aloft, slipped from the fingers of the earth,
who in her second juvenescene finds
she has forgotten laws that she gave birth.
Poor senile girth.

Time sputters, gutters, threatens to go out;
the world turns 'round in fits and gazes whole
upon her grown decrepitude. Abrupt,
she wheels about and totters off her pole.
Diurnal toll.

Space bends and twists till all tensility
is gone; fatigued, the earth releases her
cold grip to fall into the crack of doom,
eternal gloom from which she shall not stir.
So pity her.

I wrote this one in the mid-1980s and didn't much care for it then, but I sort of like it now since it reflects the alienated apocalyptic mood that I had at the time, living as I was in Bezerkeley, California.

I think that it also reveals a certain cynical humor I've yet to get beyond . . .