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40°C and Rising

Peabody Essex Museum ©


London hits forty, and the pavement goes soft

not metaphor, actual tar melting under my feet,

the city sweating through its skin,

And I can't breathe.

Not metaphor.

Actual lungs full of California wildfire,

Siberian methane, Amazon ash.

Every breath costs more than I can pay.


Bezos flies to space

on the backs of workers pissing in bottles

because bathroom breaks cut profit margins.

Musk tweets about Mars

while his lithium mines poison water tables,

while Pakistan drowns.

Gates buys 280,000 acres

while farmers lose everything,

while he lectures us about sustainability

from his climate-controlled compound.

They know.

They've always known.

They're building bunkers in New Zealand

and calculating which of us are worth saving.

The answer is none of us.


Last summer, someone died on the Tube.

Heat exhaustion. Northern Line.

Collapsed between stations,

organs shutting down one by one,

died on their way to work

because rent was due

and they don't care if you die

in the process of making them rich.

This summer will be worse.

Next summer will be worse.

There is no summer after which it gets better.


The scientists knew in the seventies.

The oil companies knew in the eighties.

The politicians knew in the nineties.

The billionaires knew the whole fucking time.

They chose this.

Profit now, consequences never.

Externalise the costs onto us,

onto the Global South,

onto the planet itself.

This isn't a natural disaster.

This is murder.

The invisible hand is their fist

around our throats.


Gaza burns, and it's not separate from this

The same extraction that's killing the planet

is the same extraction that's killing Palestinians.

Oil pipelines through occupied land.

Water is stolen for settlements while aquifers run dry.

Bombs paid for with fossil fuel money.

The wars aren't a distraction from climate collapse.

They're a symptom.

Empire is securing resources as they run out.

Borders militarised as climate refugees flee.

Genocide as population management.

Congo burns for cobalt.

Sudan starves for lithium.

Palestine bleeds for gas fields off the coast.

The same billionaires funding the bombs

are building the bunkers.

The same system is killing the planet

is killing people—

has always been killing people,

just faster now,

just more visible,

just running out of places to hide the bodies.


I'm at the meeting talking tactics

while outside it's forty degrees

and the pavement is soft

and old women are dying in council flats

and children are drowning in the channel

and Gaza is rubble

and I can't breathe—

not metaphor,

actual panic,

actual body learning what it means

to live on a dying planet

that's taking us with it,

That's been taking the Global South first,

That's been taking my people first,

always.


My people have survived

every pogrom, every displacement,

every attempt to erase us.

We've always been the canary.

Always been the first to burn.

And we're burning now.

And Gaza is burning.

And the Amazon is burning.

And it's all the same fire—

capital consuming everything,

everyone,

until there's nothing left.


The channel fills with bodies.

The Mediterranean fills with bodies.

Gaza's hospitals fill with bodies—

children, mostly.

So many children.

The Global South burns.

The billionaires build rockets.

The pavement melts.

The air turns poison.

My skin cracks like drought-earth.

I dream in flood water.

I wake to an orange sky.

I check the air quality app like a death oracle.

I check the news for the death toll.

Both rising.

Always.


At the climate march, someone says we can still fix this

and I taste copper and gasoline

and I think:

We're not going to make it.

Not all of us.

Probably not most of us.

Probably not me.

The billionaires will survive in their bunkers.

The rest of us will drown, will burn, will choke,

will die in wars over water,

over lithium, over the last arable land,

will die at borders,

will die in camps,

will die the way Gaza is dying

slowly, then all at once,

while the world watches

and does nothing.

And I'm so fucking tired.

And I'm so fucking scared.

And I'm still here anyway

not because I think we'll win

But because I don't know what else to do

Except keep singing my people's songs

while we're being erased

again, always again,

the same extinction dressed up as progress.


We're the canary.

We're still singing.

Even as the mine fills with gas.

Even as Gaza burns.

Even as the planet dies.

Even as we burn.

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