On Wednesday They Came on the News

Robert Lynn

to finally admit that the planet is burning up.
All the ice has broken and as a result
there are no such things as strangers anymore.
Or polar bears, but that’s not the point.
All the ice has broken and now there are
no strangers. Now there is no such thing as
polite silence in an elevator. Now you say hello
to every single person on the street as you
swim past. Sure, this means we are all going
to die—that was always going to happen—
but more importantly there is no ice left to break.
The planet has doffed its polar caps to us
like a gentleman in a silent movie and suddenly
we do the same to everyone that gets on the bus,
only louder, and tell them our favorite jokes,
even the off-color ones, because what’s a dirty joke
among friends when the apocalypse is coming
prematurely? Sounds like my husband,
says the reference librarian, unbuttoning her collar
to let out a little of this steam. All the ice has broken
and so there are no more quiet cars on trains,
no concept of small talk. All of it, melted away
and now in an effort to save the few trees
we have left we cut the word oversharing
from our dictionaries. There is only sharing,
so we do that, over and over. This planet
is overheating and where I expected riots, a run
on the grocery stores, and maybe roving bands
of thieves, I found instead just a bunch of my friends,
seven billion of them. We all grew up on Earth
together, back in the day, back when there was ice.
(Yeah man, remember ice?) Anyway,
those guys, I love them. All the ice has broken
and they are just texting to say Hello, I miss you.
You look hot today so hot. Positively on fire.