Write 500 words about death. Prose will select the top submissions and publish them in its first Kindle Anthology.

justinbarisich

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Saying the Same Things Over Again (5 Years Later, a found poem)

Have you ever watched a fish

writhe upon a boat deck, flip-flapping

and gasping for its last breath?

We are the fish.

And it's like a little piece of myself

keeps on dying every day.

This is Paradise Lost –

where I used to see an oil rig,

now I see a threat.

Listen, carefully: our waters are still

mysterious to even us –

the people born extracting

our dinners from them.

But when you swim in this

long enough, you learn

to trust the bayou, believe

that it’ll always be there for you,

for your pilfering.

Like oil, you can’t see shrimp –

you have to tide and predict,

gamble what the minds of sea critters

would find most comfortable.

But now there’s a sea covered in tar mats,

and we was just playing in the water,

standing in showers of oil,

forced to leave our masks onshore –

as chemical assaults bombed our backyards.

III

Our bodies only know

so many ways to tell us

we’re sick, broken.

The crude doctors know this.

The average lifespan

of people who polished Alaska

after the Exxon Valdez spill

is five years.

All of these people are now dead.

Cover-up had to be refined

to mean clean-up once again.

We did not do this to ourselves,

this was done to fuel the nation,

to break us and barren beaches.

And now we see a culture of ethical failure:

black-slathered dog-and-pony show, control

the images, the evidence of harm.

Public perception is all we have left,

but you've long since learned to deal

in misinformation, bait with plausible deniability,

cast reasonable doubt upon our shores.

It’s just the flexing

of a practiced muscle for you:

divide and conquer our communities,

pit them against one another,

let them kill themselves from within.

This is the strategy of claims war –

see how destructive money can be.

They say fishing

is the second oldest profession,

and it has survived so much, but this,

this smothers everything.

And I do not want

to end up

in a museum.

We never wanted your help,

or your annihilation,

but we bore the load upon our backs,

with both boom and bust.

So you must dig deep

to make us whole, Exxon.

Make us whole, BP.

Make us whole, America.

Do not forget

who the “w” is

intended for this time.

[NOTE 1: This is a found poem. The vast majority of the lines above are taken verbatim from the "Dirty Energy" documentary, which focuses on the fisher folk affected by the 2010 BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the featured personas' words were massaged to make it into this current form.]

[NOTE 2: In general, my poems tend to run far under 500 words. But this is one of my longer ones, and because I still wanted to submit this piece to this particular challenge, I've included this note at the bottom to hit the 500 word minimum. Yay.]