We startle at the snake but sleep through rising seas.
Ten thousand years of flinching wired us for these:
The pounce, the blade, the winter’s famine at the door—
Not the graph, the decimal, the threat too slow to roar.

We liquidate the ancient, call the residue GDP,
And chart the slow subtraction, extinction as legacy.
Each quarter posts its numbers; the trajectory is clear.
We read the projections, shrug, and shelve them til next year.

The fix is always coming, one more decade down the line—
Fusion, carbon capture, water turning into wine.
We forge our children’s signatures on debts we won’t repay,
And genuflect to blueprints we abandoned to decay.

We sand the edges off the graphs until the future’s sound,
While senators hold hearings in a slowly flooding town.
The science fills the record. The record gathers dust.
The resolutions bind us all to nothing we can trust.

We keep the facts that soothe us, cremate the ones that sting,
Then wonder why the other side hears violence when we sing.
No villain strikes the match that lights the final fire—
Just billions stoking comfort on a slowly building pyre.

We hang the bones of empires in museums, under glass,
And swear their brittle hubris is a course we’ll always pass.
We quiz our kids on Carthage, make them memorize the date—
Then build the same foundations and expect a different fate.

And so it ends the way it does for every rising ape,
Convinced until the final hour we’d somehow find escape.
We knew enough to see it coming, not enough to stop.
The last one out—kill the lights, and let the curtain drop.