it wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have it used up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it

In these lines Marquis voices an early, sardonic ecological anxiety: human “progress” is figured not as improvement but as depletion—turning fertile land into “deserts” and exhausting the planet’s capacity to sustain complex life. The repeated refrain “it wont be long now” creates a chant-like urgency, suggesting inevitability and accelerating decline. The closing image—only ants, centipedes, and scorpions surviving—invokes hardy, scavenging creatures associated with arid wastelands, implying a future in which humanity’s own habitat has been reduced to something fit only for the most resilient invertebrates. The tone blends prophecy with bitter humor, a hallmark of Marquis’s satirical sensibility.