POETRY BY JUAN MANUEL PEREZ

Juan Manuel Pérez is a Mexican-American poet of Indigenous descent and the Poet Laureate for Corpus Christi, Texas (2019-2020). He is the author of numerous poetry books including the newly published poetry-memoir, Thirty Years Ago: Life and the First Gulf War (2023). Juan is also the 2021 Horror Authors Guild’s Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award winner and a recipient of a 2021 Horror Writers Association Diversity Grant.

To learn more about this award winning poet, check out his official website HERE

THE VAST GREEN OCEAN OF THE LATE 21st CENTURY

once upon a yarn
this planet was full of trees
making oxygen

then lifetimes ago
man saw to their destruction
for fuel/production

sipping O2 tanks
bankrupting their own offspring
man’s greed could care less

this self-destruction
this ecological mess
this bleak disaster

this…is also true:
nature has corrective force
despite the abuse

cities now give way
whether or not they wanted
to trees upon trees

multiplying fast
suffocation all mankind
green oceans of trees

THIS BLUE WORLD

mermaloid greetings
when man arrived on this world
leaving theirs behind

happy to be saved
that was mankind’s beginning
life on makeshift boats

yet, it was not long
before his true intention
man was made for war

it is within him
this dreadful lust for bloodshed
this space transient 

the sea people fled
deeper into the oceans
cursing all mankind

salting the blue world
drying all that man can touch
until he’s no more

like he salts the world
to rid our cousins, the snails
one day beg for water

THE OTHER PEOPLE

there are people there
in the deepest part of blue
watching and waiting

for whom and for when
that still remains the unknown
they refuse to say

but they watch and wait
as the people of the land
go about their way

there are people there
in the deepest part of blue
watching and waiting

they say that humans
once came from the vast oceans
but he soon forgot

now on a fast track
consuming the world he knows
looming combustion

there are people there
in the deepest part of blue
watching and waiting