Leaves fall, as do Empires, in the fullness of time.

They say she wasn’t built in a day,
but Rome took generations to fall.

Will we?

In the fading dusk of democracy,
we are driven to panic by demagogues.
An empire, a lifestyle, built on finite resources,
policies built on deferral of consequence.
Fractured consensus, identities of animosity,
A groggy center holding, barely.

A revolution sounds dandy,
but a civil war is no place for innocent,
and if you think the other side will cede
without blood in the streets,
history has hard lessons for you.

Leaves fall, like lives spent in the service of empire or idealism.

But leaves grow back.

Luxuries our ancestors would have named magic,
envenoming landfills and clogging the oceans.
Desertification, rising floodwaters, resurgent diseases
spread on winds far warmer than nature provides
outside of an asteroid or pyroclasm.

We are an extinction level event
on par with the end of the Cretaceous.
We are witnessing the birth of a world
that cannot hope to sustain us.
A millennia-long harvest of dust
after a century of sewing the skies with poison.

Leaves fall, but it grows no cooler.