A New Planet Won’t Change Your Life

And those new custom shoes won’t let you walk
Out of your replica of hell. Same for the car
With the automatic everything. The clear coat will dull,
The value will sink like damning evidence,
The “check engine” light will nag you a thousand miles from home.
The demands of that new job
Will follow you to bed like a succubus or incubus
Which ever way it is you swing now, baby…
You can say you are repulsed by your neighbors,
And a one-way ticket to ride one a billionaire’s fever dream
Is the secret sauce to make you a someone,
Trailblazer, adventurer, icon.
You can gaze at the red canyons and valleys
And pity those of us left
On this supposed dying swirled sapphire marble
But remember the color of your new home
Disguises the fact that you will freeze
If the oxygen doesn’t run out sooner,
And Elton John has been telling us for decades
That the war god planet
Is no damned place to start a family.

Troy Schoultz is a lifelong Wisconsin resident. His poems, stories, and reviews have appeared in Seattle Review, Rattle, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Santa Monica Review, Steel Toe Review, Midwestern Gothic, Palooka and many others in the U.S. and U.K. since 1997. He is the author of two chapbooks and three full-length collections.  He is also a analog collage artist. For more information check out https://troyschoultz.wixsite.com/website