Archive
07/19/10
Sequel
Throughout my prolific career of creative adult years, I've enjoyed make-believing I'm myriad make-believe people, Larger-than-life personages I'm not and otherwise can't be, Assuming disguises that single me out As a daring doer of outsize deeds, a mover of universes.
But of all the psyches I've occupied, The one that most intrigues, captivates, and appropriates me Is that of the Lorax, the Lifted Lorax, The oracle who speaks for the trees, the Truffula Trees, The Brown Bar-ba-loots, the Swomee-Swans, and the Humming-Fish,
The only defender of his land's innocent inhabitants, Its flora and fauna existing in tenuous harmony, Dependent upon each other, for their perpetuity, The solitary advocate for clear skies, clean lakes and streams, That fragile balance between nature and man-made greed,
The sole voice speaking out against the Once-ler, That avaricious, green-armed creature, Living yet, by his lonely self, in his desolate, ramshackle Lerkim, That rapacious defiler of the sanctified habitat Which Theodor Geisel, disguised as Dr. Seuss, imagined...
The shortish, oldish, brownish, mossy Lorax, Who, despite all his rectitude, integrity, and moral indignation, Fails, sadly, to protect his delicate flock, Leaving, in its and his exodus, but a pile of rocks Impressed with "UNLESS," to attest to a presence once precious, An enigmatic word freighted with significance, Weighted with the possibility of ominous apocalypse, Which only he, initially, and the Once-ler, eventually, As well as the little boy come lately, Sense possesses an inordinate importance for the future,
The survival of mankind and its doomed planet, If only someone can plant the one remaining Truffula Tree seed, Which the old, worn-out, inconsolably repentant Once-ler guards And sells to the curious little boy, for fifteen cents, A nail, and the shell of a great-great-great grandfather snail,
For one last chance to turn everything rainbow-tufty again — That seven-year-old named Parker Kekoa Green, Who, in his own inchoately precocious mind of minds, Has conceived of writing a sequel to Dr. Seuss's The Lorax, In which a little boy named Parker saves the whole world.
07/19/10
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