DJ Got Us Fallin in Love by Usher plays in the club as the world burns 

    but the DJ is disaster porn daddy                     Al Gore

blasting air horns and                 ‘I told you sos’

        and we’re fallin in love with                  

                                           systemic industrial negligence

there’s a seductive urgency

    to grind in synchronicity with the solar flares

              to make out         with unkempt oil lobbyists

So dance dance like its

  give us rainforest shot glasses       and a big-ass smoke machine

give us golden jet fuel showers        but not the sexy kind

      give us styrofoam songs             written with

kākāpō-feathered quills

dipped in the blood of an   equally 

   endangered, equally              important native bird

           let us leave this whale skin dance floor 

retire to our respective dumpsters

                                                                         the last last night of 

recycling’s hot     but so are we

      we’re 99% artificial colours, flavours and preservatives

we’re the worst compost 

    hack us into loving segments

                                            drag us to a manmade island 

        let us             decay unnaturally             leeching toxins   

               and poor attitudes            down the ocean’s gullet

                                                                                      your life life

sometimes we’re the garbage

sometimes the real garbage is         the friends we make along the way

sometimes                 the friends we make along the way 

       are stuffed                   in black bags              clumped broken

in a broom closet               waiting for the bartender

                                                          to take us out

Jordan Hamel

Jordan Hamel is a Pōneke-based poet and performer. He was the 2018 New Zealand Poetry Slam champion and represented Aotearoa at the World Poetry Slam Champs in the US. He is the co-editor of Stasis Journal and co-editor of a forthcoming Climate Change Poetry Anthology from AUP. He has words in the Poetry NZ Yearbook, Landfall, The Spinoff, takahē, Sport, Newsroom, Mayhem, and elsewhere.