Some poetry, because Kari did it

So I should be writing this essay which is due tomorrow and is only half done (!!), but instead I'm about to go out to Subway and thought I might type up some of the poetry I've scribbled in my notebook this year, because Kari's put some of her stuff up and I figure what the hell, this stuff's just gonna rot away unread in my notebook if I don't.

Ballad for a Ruined World

By this time thirty years from now,
The planet will have changed:
The oceans will not know themselves;
The continents, estranged.

The city lights like fireflies
Will fade with winter’s chill,
Electric brains in satellites
Will sputter and fall still.

The sky will clear of metal wings,
The tracks will clear of trains,
No more will tractors trundle ‘cross
The endless waves of grain.

The world we made of glass and steel,
Our concrete urban throne--
Those towers will be sepulchers
For ash and dust and bone.

Those angels that still orbit Earth
May on occasion spy
Some relics, insect-like and frail
Who still refuse to die--

Who knows if they could find a way
To overcome the past?
Old habits, though, they say die hard,
And bad ones tend to last.

It’s possible it’s just our fate--
Consumption is our curse.
And the planet will withstand us:
It has, they say, seen worse

I’d like to be among them
On that terrible, glorious day.
I’d like to think that, with some luck
We’d maybe find a way.

They say we’re born a ruined race
Condemned by ancient sin
I’m not so sure, but this I know—
The worst foe lies within.

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love poem

it's been a while
but I think I'm
finally starting to come 'round
and all the lazy afternoons
we could have spent together
but didn't
I'm sorry for

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Away in a Manger

"I don't know," Maggie said, though she did not resist as he led her by the hand behind the old barn. "I don't think your mum would approve, J.C."
"Of course she wouldn't," he said, allowing the scent of her hair to knock him flat on a pile of hay. "She doesn't know the first thing about this kind of stuff."
He gave her the kind of reckless grin
that was the reason she'd followed him here
and was the reason she'd followed him anywhere at all
And she didn't know that for the thousand years to come
and the thousand years after that
wars would be started over him
people would kill in his name
without ever seeing that smile
"What would your dad say?" she asked him.
"Oh, he'd be rooting for me," he said. Cheeky grin as always.
"I meant your real dad," Maggie said, hands on her hips in that spurious way that he found so attractive.
"So did I," he said, and she finally deigned to join him in the hay.
And it didn't occur to him that
if someone had heard him say that
if someone had written it down
then people might've believed it
and how much healthier and freer people would be
for two millennia
But Maggie just shushed him in a way that really wouldn't lend credence to the notion that she was scolding him and said
"I thought you were technically a man of the cloth."
"Born into it, I'm afraid," he said, "but I suppose I could always take the cloth off..."
And this time she grinned. She couldn't help it. He was infectuous, he possessed her, and
if only people could be happy like him,
she thought
if only everyone could hear him talk like this,
she thought
they'd be so happy
But then and there, it was just her.
And so she stopped thinking about it.

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Thoughts?