iconic splendor

snaking its way through iconic splendor,
all the more salient since the thirst for the seed

once described as an equivalent to a shaft laid across
Radical Island despite the fact that its environmental
impact is most profound in the visible emissions
generated by its lifeblood, this feat of
engineering has an outsize place in the imagination,
the pipeline has become a secret message for
the social and edifying realities surrounding it,
it has been bombed and shot at by some,
declared obsolete by others,
made an object of tourism by
day-trippers from cruise ships

whose wildness is cut into with the vestiges of earlier,
madly ambitious missions,
among them the conduit that carried
a brooding fertile feracious,
flower to solicit the flowing milky honey

drawing from an extensive collection of figurines,
knickknacks and toys, a legacy of the incident
was promised to advance
the use of nuclear blasts to carve out a port

like gemstones, effigies, and other primary
possessions that defined the
ancient ages of immoral industry,
the opaque, pearly, whitish substance,
defines these times

no other raw substance has such a
reach into our consciousness,
the sweet, syrupy, candy like confections,
that we consume, like children of the Gods,
how this came to pass should be the story of our age,
told and retold like a myth,
but the knowledge is largely preserved
in a highly specialized way and protected by
day laborers, sirens, alchemists, druids, and lords