Tug Dumbly - World That Cried Wolf

World That Cried Wolf         

Cavemen were Declinists.  

Negative nellies in ancient Rome.

The old time Med a littoral bummer

of Gypo sad sacks

and Hellene catastrophists.  

We’re all at sea in bright certainty,

would rather chart a discomfort zone

like Pliny, crying ‘fortune favours the bold!’  

as he sailed into Pompeii

to be eaten by ash.

From Gilgamesh to Glomesh

we prognosticate decay.

Barbarians never cease crawling

across the steppes of the mind,

their camps blossom like bacteria.  

America’s dedicating daddies

wrang hands and bells –

‘they’re ‘a comin’, I tells ya!’  

And don’t we love it!  

our never-ending ending

in all them Wars – the Club ones,

Sword ones, Musket ones,
World ones, Cold one, Terror one …

And now the Sun one:

Hotnufforya?

He who forecasts the most lurid end wins:

‘They’ll do for us, they will!’

squawks Chicken Little to Hanrahan,

as they cross the road, hand in hand,

with the Boy who Cried Trump             
                           till ‘thump!’

they’re cleaned up by a van.

But then – yawn – they just get up,

like Wile E. Coyote,

dust off and start plotting

the next Apocalypse,

neat as a Super plan.  

Sure, civilizations do get wiped

like grommets from a wave.

But, Big-Picture-wise, we’ve been lucky so far –

no meteor or madman to blow the Globe.

Our finish has been tantrically delayed.  

Bible ends with a thump,

wishes it could take us with it,

Rapture us to bed.

But we’ll probably stay up a bit later yet,

just to watch the play,

to hear Liz Taylor say ‘whadda dump!’

It’s fun to play Doomsday:  

‘I have drunk and seen the spider’.

So pass the Grange and a Derringer

to arrange my neat little hole.

Let me too hitch my wagon

to this wolf-crying train and proclaim

‘we’re finished, fucked, doomed, done!’

Let me too condemn this current age

of decadence, degeneracy, cowardice, vacuity

and pine for those Golden Fable days.  

‘In today’s busy world’, the ads all say.

Though peasants scraping peat

from ancient bogs for heat

had their hands full too.

They also dreaded a roast end,

but at least weren’t plagued

by funeral insurance ads,

and never suffered the agony of hearing

‘sorry, your card has been declined’.

… Still, this time, maybe this time

it really is going to arrive,

our glorious all-together-now-end.

No more Millennial bullshit

or false black dawns,

but the fire this time

as we frolic towards extinction

like screaming kids into a wave.

I don’t want to falsely raise the temperature

of expectation yet again,

But it is kinda getting hot round here.