"energy in America" by Steven Schroeder

You cain’t let oil wait! It’s waited too long. It wants to come up! I worked too long as a revivalist for something that didn’t come. The end of the world, No more waiting! Things got to materialize.
    - Oil King, in William Goyen’s Come, The Restorer

If finding and producing energy in America were as easy as Jed Clampett and his rifle made it look in the opening credits of the Beverly Hillbillies, we probably wouldn’t have needed to pioneer a well stimulation technology known as hydraulic fracturing. But it isn’t, and so we did – first using the process in 1947 to stimulate flow of natural gas from the Hugoton field in Kansas.
    - Halliburton, Fracturing 101

it produced phenomenal results for us
    - Dick Cheney

the end of the world
no more
waiting, it wants

a small percentage of additives
it wants it wants it wants
to come up

down the hatch
a little torture
a little force
a little murder
stimulate the flow

follow and as it were hound
nature in her wandering
drive her afterward

the same place the same
place the same
place

remediate

phenomenal results
enhanced interrogation
to stimulate
the flow.

either you are with us, or

no more

the incidence of fractures
is difficult to quantify

severe pain may
radiate anteriorly, may
mimic the breaking of a heart
and great earthquakes shall be
in divers places and famines
and pestilences and
fearful sights and
great signs

old men rave on
young men dreaming
dream murder and there is

a crack in everything and there is more
heat than light and there is no end in sight.


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Steven Schroeder is a poet and visual artist who has spent many years moonlighting as a philosophy professor. His most recent collections are Turn (with David Breeden) and Raging for the Exit. More at stevenschroeder.org.