There is an exhibition about Monsters of the Permian:

they roamed the planet before the dinosaurs.

They look the same to me, with big gnashers and claws.
I need cash. Don’t we all? Lunchtime comes.

I walk with a heavy bag to the second hand bookshop

which buys and sells. I sell only. My library is thinning. 
The Permian, all 46.7 million years of it, was jammed

between the Carboniferous and Triassic Periods,

and featured the supercontinent Pangaea. True fact.
I make small talk with Richard behind the counter.

Walk away with my $30, feeling halfway between

20 and 70 million years old in the Mortgagearian Epoch.
As well as reptiles, there were Permian creatures

that were kind of proto-mammals:

hairy little fuckers with mean eyes.
I paid for my children to see that exhibition.

They read wall panels about the great dying.

The gigadeaths of the great and small.
That’s how the Permian concluded: the great dying.

That’s what they call it. Lava floods.

Methane clathrates. Aridity. Acidity. Anoxia.
I search for the two bills in my wallet: a twenty and ten.

Gone. Nothing there. I look again as if

they could magically reappear.
After the great dying, it took ten million years for life

to get back to something resembling normal.

(The hairy little fuckers hid under rocks.)
Now I’m standing in front of a sign

advertising the Permian Monsters,

as I rifle through my pockets, in rage, in anguish.
Then a bit later on it all got smashed again

by the killer asteroid 65 million years ago,

and the HLFs were the only game left in town.
I’m searching for my missing cash

as killer asteroids explode on my head

on this fucking planet, this planet of death.