An ecopoem.
You didn't come to this world to carry lorries full of shit into the Persian sea.
To become a human toilet for a monogrammed handbag.
To sell your voice for feet,
to sell your feet, no voice,
to sell
and not get paid.
A million years of evolution,
fighting our way out of hunter-gather mode,
you didn't come into this time and again
to fight again
back into that hunter-gather state.
Into the sharp eyes,
sharp jaw,
sharp cheeks,
shark mindset.
Into that state of famine,
hoarder,
taking over,
as if resources,
while finite,
were not in surplus rotting in the fields.
You didn't come into this world to flaunt
a carbon-neutral life,
while in the attic,
lands in conflict,
Dorian Gray portraits crumble underneath your landfill.
An Indonesian kid has never been to Sainsbury’s,
yet his bare feet trip over an empty packet of Free From lemon cake.
Sharp, like the face features your cousin up in Doncaster doesn't possess.
It's over for him, they say.
He's only 12.
None of you came into this world for this.
None of us came into this world for this.
To carry waste, to hoard it, dump it, treat each other like we're waste.
To measure our value against an A4 sheet of paper ‘round our waist.
Made from a lot of cellulose that came for surely thicker trees.
Then it's over for them, they say.
They're only 12 times 12.
None of us came to be over.
To claim “game over” right before pushing the “start” button in life.
We might be wasted,
might be wasting,
but if we truly saw that we came to live instead of to just lie and rot,
like empty packets in a field,
like human garbage in the sea,
on the face of someone who just wants a pretty picture in the desert,
in a freezing-cold sixth-grade classroom,
a boiling office,
doom…
we'd bloom.
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