An Entrance into Consumption

Our venture

years ago
into the world of the
earth;

into the world
of the dirt and the growing

led us to feel with every
cell and with every corpuscle
we call us

that there was something
wrong; there was something
amiss.

My wife and I would
tend the soil.

It was the small innuendos
at the party that would
reveal
the true heart of people -

the heart of stone cold greed
and inability to see their own
avarice and contempt for

all creation.

A backward glance
that was a sneer - more than
a glance. A sending
out of pointed shards,
not a soft receiving.

Each mingling with the masses
that we would enter into would
cause us to return home

elaborating on our silent venture
and subtle conspiracy with the
earth to overtake the planet
with herbs, and trees, and perennial-life
laced with horrid compost.

Our encounters with a generation
gone made with its own need for
everything it could imagine

dropped us to our knees to
plant oceans of daffodils
and tulips;

to rage against
the existential dread of a people

that could not see the nations of
plastic and waste growing
just beyond the perception
of their small and flailing egos;

beyond the invisible boundaries
of what used to be community.

Each one a car - and then 3 -
each one a hose,
each one a mower, a blower, and
whacker.

Each one 4 toilets, 3 showers,
3 televisions, 5 computers.

Each one having more and more
until it become
just beyond vogue,

to build spaces called units,
to pile higher and deeper with the
debris of our own eager
spoilage and despotism of
stuff.

Temperatures are rising.
Colonies of bees are dying.
Limping and bedraggled
mankind is now speaking of the

global crisis.

At their parties.

In their homes.

But no one will
ride a horse.  Not one will
refuse electric.

What we now know and hold as
self-evident truths

we have allowed to grow beyond
our control

and it will change us vastly.

We run against the tide
and the wind to find
a lackey we can point to

to hang from a willow -
in shame -

for all the destruction he has
heaped upon this earth.

We walked through
this door years ago

we are only just now
recognizing

that the map we used to get
to where we are

had only one destination.

Consumption.

We can still put
things back in the earth
that matter.

We can plant hope
with our trowel,
just next to the rudbeckia.

We can turn under joy
when we compost our
dirt with the remnants
of our harvests.

There is a circle
we are a part of,

but, we must leave
this place of tangled
usurping digestion.

How will we get
back through the door
we have clumsily

entered?