Two Haibun by Jim Natal

I’ve lived long enough

I’ve lived long enough to see the Bible proven wrong. The rich have inherited the earth. Remember the bestselling myth of The Millionaire Next Door? Forget it. Ever seen the old black-and-white TV show The Millionaire in which some fictional down-and-outer was given a check for a million dollars, tax free, by rich guy Michael Anthony? Chump change. Speaking of television, The Six Million Dollar Man from the 1970s is being re-booted as, what else, The Six Billion Dollar Man. In other words, worth is measured in billions now. Powerball tickets, too. When was the last time you heard about a corporate merger, a start-up buyout, with a figure in the millions? Any CEO mogul, hedge fund manager, ruthless dictator, international criminal, App creator, or Super PAC mega-donor worth his pink sea salt has nine zeros in his Panamanian/Cayman (previously Swiss) bank account. Of course, life is not all roses and cherry bowls for billionaires. It’s as hard to park all that cash (legit or not) as it is to find an unpermitted space on a Santa Monica side street. Now that bank laundries are under close scrutiny, I hear Miami high-rise condos are being bought and gambled like casino chips. Shrewd move…until sea levels rise and those investments are deeper underwater than a middle-class mortgage.

Elephants, blue whales,
Himalayan mountain peaks
Too big to fail

Climate change naysayers

Climate change naysayers. Unproven science. Fake news. The sky is falling down in flames. The hottest year on record worldwide and the new year promises to be hotter yet. But don’t sweat it. This has all happened before and we survived, didn’t we? So what if Phoenix and furnace are now interchangeable terms? So what if the polar caps are melting like ice chips in a Happy Hour margarita? Oh, and ignore those ceaseless firestorms and tropical storms, that 70-mile crack in the Antarctic glacier that calved like a gargantuan white cow. Repeat after me and a sage Oklahoma senator, along with an actual climate scientist (who also believes smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer): global warming isn’t real and it’s not our fault. Why make a volcano out of a molehill? Trust us—97 percent of the world’s scientists can be wrong.

Dandelion clocks
So much for humanity
Dries up, blows away

Jim Natal is the multi-year Pushcart Prize-nominated author of two collections of poems in haibun form, 52 Views: The Haibun Variations and Spare Room, as well as three previous lyric collections, including Memory and Rain. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, San Pedro River Review, Hotel Amerika, Angle of Reflection, and Los Angeles in the 1970s. He is the director of The Literary Southwest Poetry series and co-founder of Conflux Press.