Slake

Unbiased news source, I tune in, they lie

in bed with corporate sponsors, suppressing balance

impressing unrefined dry ballast onto crests

Waves spryly and reports: entertainingly  

attuned to fan opinions, fighting at last

resorts to

tooth and nail, or not at all

i know they get a secret irksome joy, expressing

a fake British accent when saying slake

in reference to supplying oil for the world’s increasing thirst

for it, as if it can be drunk,

sobering: water’s cleaved from this: starting to rain

acid rain, it rinses terrain after origin skyward, cyclically

spinning ’round, in trained captive groundwaters ‘owned’

by a company who zoned out, paid off leaders

wants and takes your barreled rains

drained from your own yard extirpated or they’ll sue

as if it was ever your own land

you paid dearly, but they’ll take it when you die

they capital gains tax you into oblivion if you profit

they’ll use modern land ownership practices

saying it’s not the tribe’s communal property,

that’s not how we do it, and you’re not even Native

to be told you’ll have any land rights stripped

to the nudity, fertility symbol bearing fruit but

they’ll take it and feign high moral ground

in the canyons and make it look fair

or at least call it legal with eminent domain

getting down to sticky brass tacks, buzzing about colony collapse

and busied taskmasters, maddens us more than tax, but I’m straining too,

accept the land as it is, as it’s declared, dry and not mine

even though I paid, with a lifetime mortgaged

and bereaved

of its framed cattle fencing, free range isn’t free,

but it’s fast when you express dislike when you fight

in open ranges, target shards cut open a bit of harvest fruit juice, slakes that parched

ground’s bitter dustbowl, desertification, the salinized earth, the imported

imperialistic fumigated edibles that drenched you out, and desertion floats, a way

of business, saturated market floor, stock, floods, embedded,

costly endeavors, profit lost,

tearing up on imagining some vague assessments tossed your way like desert bone

of real, hard cost

and all that has been lost, or ever will be, they owned it, you, and also your tears

before they even kiss in betrayal the slighted and drought riddled ground