NEW! Poem by Rob Cook

Rob Cook

THE SONG OF THE WATER PLANET

The water is a lie. 
The water will be blamed for its own disappearance.
The water flows to us from the basements of the earth.
The water goes brown in its invisible cities. 
The water moves with expeditions of punctured tarpaulin.
The water breeds only uncountable and useless water.
The water will be punished for revealing its unforgivable information.
The water will be poisoned and devoured by human lobsters.
The water will return because there are no other gods. 
The water will be given only the protection of the pelican word for “water”

while it weakens with the stillness of all plankton.

The water’s father will be fed the lost laughter of a hermit crab. 
Treat the water as an animal flowing with cellophane mist.
Invest in the toxic potentials of water. 
Buy and sell water! 
Predict the prices of water, the demands of the crowds of water.
If water does not advance, then water will be killed.
None of the water is new.
Water is an old and hackneyed master.
Water is less valuable than television movies of ice.
Water is less valuable than a dress pregnant with octopus.
Water is less valuable than men fighting in cell phone pictures.
Water that can be thought of as a vertebrate now. 
Water that can be heard when its bones of a thousand windows point toward the sky.
There are no longer spaces between people and the red robot sounds of water.
There are no longer sanctuaries of benevolent water in the petroleum eternity.
There are no longer songs whose water has never been touched.
There are search towers instead of oxygen on the microscope slides 

of slowed river water.

The water cannot be trusted: it is no longer a proven place of healing.
The water cannot be trusted even when our spies have infiltrated 

the fish cameras of algae hotels.  

The water can’t be tasted: it can be guessed at, but never known.  
The water’s people will have no water to drink, no water to cut open for the deeper water.
They will have to sip the false glacier melt from their own parched bodies.
They will forget the lakes and reservoirs and underground oceans of fog.
The water can be discussed, but only in leviathan apocrypha. 
The water can be felt as pain because the insides of the water are turning human now.
The water is despised, the water is overcrowded, the water is herded 

and forced into plastic bottles with no mother, no father, 

not a word or a prayer or a breath from the next labeled crack of light.

The water can be listened to because its molecules are thickening from a horrible thirst. 
The water is not dying, the iron people will tell you

while the water cowers in the bottomless aquifers of antifreeze, 

unable to move the heavier water, unable to reach the iron surface

where the ships are not afraid and the sonar is an advancing predator

that survives now in fleets of shark memory.

No one listens to their weeping that can be drilled and tested and taken away. 
No one feels the stronger water nuzzling 

the weaker water during the body’s mutilation dramas.

How will anyone survive the stillness of water, 

how will anybody endure the secrets among the water’s many selves. 

Each person betrays, through a blunted thirst, his or her graveyards of rain.
Each person hears and ignores—as difficult, wasteful, and unproven—

the cries of the dark and falling water.