SINGING TO THE EARTH UNTIL A TREE GROWS

PATRICK LAWLER

 

SINGING TO THE EARTH UNTIL A TREE GROWS

(A POEMFORMANCE)

 

1.

Did you hear the one about the priest, the minister, and the rabbi who walk into a
bar, and the bartender asks, “Is this some kind of joke?” I sometimes think of
trees—and then I reprimand myself. “You are nothing but a dreamer.” I know it’s silly.
Romantic nostalgist that I am.

Oh, memory, you are a bastard. Is this some kind of joke?

Remember when there was Glut all over the place—a whole gut full of glut
and gluttony.                      COUGH

Back then everything was diamonds—and Cheetos.

Ladies and Gentlemen—we’d hear them say. And who could resist that?

We needed energy—a Volcanic eruption and a baking powder fizz. We needed
progress at the expense of everything.

It was our Boom Time.                 BOOM.

Exhilaratingly beatific. Viral and raw—to feed our quirks and indulgences.
And we were the beautiful and the crumbling—

Always on the verge of building a bridge just a step ahead of our feet.

At heart I am a broken hearted ecologist—everything is connection.

Hey, Place and Time shake hands.

Hey, Question and Answer shake hands.

                                   BUZZER

Did we ring the buzzer in time enough to give the answer?

Hope feels unfed—the puzzle is broken.

We lose ourselves in the glow of our fires and our engines.

All of our palpitating digital devices….

We needed to put the ashes back together to find out what we burned.

                                                                                    I was singing chalalala.

Once there was a fire that fit inside my mouth.

                                             Chalalala

My song— unholy, erudite, full of unresolved conflict.

I’m like an explorer among the ruins—a forensics expert picking apart the pieces
of civilization with tweezers and a leaf blower and a bulky bag.

We wanted to burn away our past. Here is a list of things I don’t remember.

Maybe this is my heart—                                                        maybe it is yours.

                                            Do not look at what we did.

 

2.

 

                                    We didn’t listen. The frogs told us.
                                    The bees told us. We didn’t listen
                                    The wind told us. The coral told us.

I feel like I am Dante–except there is no Virgil and no symmetry. No meaningful circles.
I’m a new species with my hazmat suit and my hose–wandering the streets of all our abandoned Las
Vegases. I’m a new Disney character wandering around the Magic Kingdom blurting out
funny things with my dangling tubes, my nozzle, my chemical hat.

I’m a beetle with an exoskeleton backpack doing an apocalyptic jig.

I’m a gag picker, a spill scavenger, a junk forager. I’m a scrapper.

They called it The Crash. We are living through our Resur-wreck-tion.

                                                  Cleanup on planet six.

The storm surges—the rising seas—drowned cities. It was our normal. It was
our OK. Because nature still survived on the internet.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’d hear them say. And who could resist that?

Now we know we were all autistic. We were wasted on our waste.

We were arsonists carrying torches and gasoline cans.

We should have listened to something other than ourselves.

                                         I suck up the past
                                         with my vacuum hose.

                                        I grimly sweep.
                                        Some dimly weep.
                                        Everything is a chimney.

We were soul arsonists. Now there is only fire season—and dead ends
and boiled up oceans.

We lived between trash and cash in our
Imperialistcorperatemiliteristicconsumeristcapitalistcolonialist project.

So we lived our 2 ½ planet lifestyles—drinking 40,000 year old water—breathing
1.5 million year old air once locked in ice.

The saddest thing about the apocalypse is that it can happen without you even
knowing it.

We were so numbed by our gadgetry. Electronic billboards flashed pictures of
trees. We were so good at spewing. The sky is steel wool.

We need to develop a Field Manual for the Coming Crash:

     1. Take a cruise on a Garbage barge.
     2. Develop fish who eat plastic, birds who eat smoke.
     3. For the standup tragedians, there will be canned crying.
     4. Walk the thin line between darkness and darkness.
     5. Be the Trepidation expert—drill right down into the center of it all.
     6. Discover our lives in the bellies of animals.

 

3.

 

THE WORLD IS MADE OF FLESH AND WE HAVE A SOUL LEAK.

We had interludes with the divine and the pornographic—crawling between
brothels and monasteries. Writing love letters to suicides, anorexics, addicts—
anyone who still had skinny eyes.

Alex Tribeck, we love you—and we don’t even know ho to spell your name.

We are post witnesses.                                             We don’t see.

Ladies and gentlemen, come to my scrapheap, my meltdown, my drowntowns,
my aquatic junkyards.

I have an appendage—a nozzle—a breathing apparatus—a pack strapped to my
back like fear itself. Rich Nature’s store has been shoplifted, plundered,
vandalized.

                                                                  BOOM

I’m a florist bringing blooms to sit around the rotting. I peck around the debris like
a toxic chicken.

Every place is Guiyu, Fukashima, the Pacific Trash Vortex. Every place is a
trash heap—Dandora and Deonar. Every place is the Wasteland, Times Beach,
Linfen, Kabwe. Every place is Area 51. Every place is Jeopardy. Every place is
Centralia.

I can’t tell you how many things have died on my doorstep. We didn’t listen.

I started making a list of the things we’ve lost—star fish and octopus, snow
leopards and eagles, polar bears and butterflies. But it got too long and I started
choking on it.

                                                 Nothing is impermeable.
                                                 Nothing is a self-contained breathing apparatus.

I feel like I am Dante except there is no Beatrice.

I would like you to say something here______________.
Why are you silent? Hit the buzzer. Say anything. Cough. Yell. Do something.

Living is the least we can do.

 

4.

 

Thanks for coming to my PowerPoint presentation.

Let’s say there was a world. Let’s say we were in it. Let’s say we were at a
time—at a juncture—at the perfect place—that could change everything.

A Jew and a Christian and a Muslim walk into a mall…

My job is to check if things are breathing.

We dug our own graves with the things we bought from Walmart, and then we
marked our graves with the things we bought from BestBuy. A 60 mile internet
connected, 3D, high definition TV. With an infinite number of channels.
We often mistook what we saw for reality. We often mistook what we saw for our
own deaths. Well.

COUGH

I would like to ask for a volunteer; I would like to ask for forgiveness.

Alex, did I tell you I had a vision?              BUZZER                 Not really.

I once knew a professor who said he knew nothing. I once knew a journalist who
said don’t believe anything you read. I once knew a scientist who said—PCB’s
how bad can it be? It’s in mother’s breast milk.

I remember when there used to be trees…. I remember when there used to be
water…you could drink. I remember when there used to be cities by the sea that
weren’t drowned.

Guzzle this up through the neural pathways. There is much to beguile us. But
finally—finally—the earth needs us. It needs us to save it from our destructive
tendencies.

I’m a living hypodermic.                          The world mushy with chemicals and waste.

I remember I once saw a man with a lateral extraction device—and I said: what
the hell are you doing? I remember I once saw a man burning the icebergs.

We were snorting our sugar, our fat, our salt—our thing gluttony.

It was our tomb time in tune town. It was our bloom time in doom town. We
were pretending to be awake. We were bio-polar.

                                                           Do you remember the Heart famine?

I would like to ask for a volunteer and I’m not kidding—

We will require sutures to close up the wounds. The birds stitch the clouds
together the way words stitch our world together.

I once knew an economist who said if you want to know the truth you’re looking
in the wrong place. I once knew a government official who said oops.

A 60 mile, internet connected, 3D, high definition TV. With an infinite number
of channels and they are all turned to Jeopardy.        HUM JEOPARDY TUNE

We dug our graves with our own bare hands. The bad news is we are all clones.
The good news is we are all each other.

I remember when there used to be a world.

 

5.

 

Birds never used nouns.
Fish never used prepositions.
Monkeys never used adverbs.
Insects never used conjunctions.
All of them used verbs.

Together they once sang.

I’m like a robot with a suitcase full of poisons.

We never found out who installed a malicious program on our devices.

The bees became drunk on their own honey.
Butterflies were crystallized. The gas lamp in the belly of the lightning bugs was
extinguished.

We used to wear diamond blindfolds.
We wrapped crime tape around the past; now we wrap it around the future.

 

6.

 

                             Here I am
                             Wash the brain
                             wash the sky
                             scrub the earth
                             Scrub scrub scrub

                             Wash the brain
                             wash the sky
                             Scrub scrub scrub

I sometimes think my life is just like Waiting For Godot—except I’m only one
person and there is no tree and there is no Godot. Not that there was a Godot
in Waiting for Godot, but at least there was the waiting—and as far as our lives are
concerned there is no more waiting.

Ultimately who could have blamed us? We resorted to burning the earth to keep
our mansions warm. To burning water to quench our thirst.

Always on the verge of building a bridge just a step behind us.

Ladies and Gentlemen, step right up.
Glass of water/glass of money.
So how are we supposed to choose?

I have a faucet installed in my chest. I’m a marionette with hoses attached.
I’m tethered— the burning hole in my brain attached to the burning hole in the
earth.

Did you hear the one about the Mayan, the man in the Haz Mat suit,
And the Whore of Babylon? Did you hear the one about the Black Swan Event,
the Fatal funnel, and the BOOM in our Boom Time?

People were telling jokes about the apocalypse like there was no tomorrow.

Did you hear the one about BEE COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER?
Or was it HUMAN COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER?

You’ve seen our Dr. Preppers with their bugout bags.

It was our doom time in bloom town.

We started to fill up the hole. We started to sweep up the rubble—to pop out
the crushed—to hammer out the crashed. Dead seas, melting capes, polluted this
and that, the expanding loss, emptier emptiness…

Maybe WE are the invasive species in a disappearing world.
Oh, but the sunshine and fakery were so pervasive—so bountifully pervasive.

Maybe I can spray a little this to cover the stink of that.

                                                Alex, my buzzer isn’t working.
                                                I’ve got the right answer
                                                or really the right question.
                                                Damn it, Alex, you’re confusing me–
                                                you smug asshole.
                                                Smug man with all the questions.

Did you see this string attached to my heart?

From my window I watched the world bend.

Oh god—and I don’t mean God—not like that.
I want to sing to this place until a tree grows out of it.

                                        Chalalalala

I would like to ask for a volunteer.

 

                                                         ◊

 

 

 

 

Directed by Theodore Schaefer

Written by Patrick Lawler and Theodore Schaefer

Sponsored by SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry 
esf.edu/

Summary:
Singing to the Earth Until a Tree Grows is a short film set in the future about the effects of climate change on our world It explores the lives of two people, possibly the last man and woman on Earth, as they try to live their lives in this new reality. The man, who wishes he were a standup comic, spends his days exploring the post-apocalyptic cityscape, where he discovers an old VHS camera. With it he decides to create a reverse time capsule, a chronicle of the world that now exists, for the past. The woman, an artist, is pregnant. She struggles with finding meaning and attempts to capture that struggle in her new painting — a giant canvas spread on the floor of her living room, which she is painting for her unborn daughter. Together they face the struggle of everyday life as possibly the last two humans on Earth.

A Leaping Elephant Production