Anthropogenic Climate Change as a Bar Joke
Lancaster, CA
2022, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
a dog, a turtle, a horse, and a dead seagull walk into a bar…
the bar
wonders where
the land has gone,
where all the people have gone,
and who let the oil coated
school of fish in, because section
25665 of California law
says minors aren’t allowed in
bars, although the bar is
not sure that matters anymore.
the dog
wonders why
the air tastes like salt
and breathing feels like drowning.
he sees rows of empty tin cans
and discarded glass bottles, imagining
he could use a tin can as a hat.
the dog only realizes where he is
when sea fills his lungs and
the green-blue water turns black.
the dead seagull
wonders nothing
because she is dead.
but when she was alive
her wings would cut through the sky,
like she used to cut herself
before her parents taught
her to avoid the large shards of glass,
but not small ones and
not plastic, when eating through trash.
back then, the only thing she
wondered was if the black ooze she
sometimes saw in the sand was the same
black ooze that killed her sister,
the thought
would make her body ache.
today a plastic bag got caught on her neck
and dulled her wings, she fell into the sea
and the ocean ached.
the horse
wonders how
the plastic bottles are
floating in the sky and why
his body feels so light, and if
those young fish
are supposed to be here.
the turtle
wonders why
the ocean won’t stop crying and
what a dog, a horse, a dead seagull, and a bar,
are doing underwater.
Reflection
We have all heard the classic “three men walked into a bar” joke or some variation of its form, and I wanted to use the joke’s structure to create a poem on how climate change is killing our planet. I thought about how I could manipulate the joke's format to talk about climate change in a surreal and playful manner. I also wanted to insert images of how pollution from plastic bottles, tin cans, and oil spills affect marine life, and attempted to mix that reality with absurdity. This was a very bittersweet process because it was fun coming up with the ridiculous scenarios, but at the same time the effects of climate change are still very real, the ocean waters are rising, there are still fish getting sick because of toxic oils, and marine animals are dying from eating plastic.