Together, misdirected.
There is a wound. so deep and infected.
Can we correct it?
Less than a thousand yrs ago we lived off the land with respect and
Were taught how plants like camomile protect us from indigestion.
So I’m going to ask you some questions:
When was the last time you strolled through the woods,
and touched tree bark and the smelled the moist of the mud?
Did you know we spend over 7 hours looking at a screen?
That’s in a day, and it’s increasing, which can’t be good.
When for one third we’re supposed to be sleepin.
She’s weeping. Earth, who raised us knowing right and wrong,
now sick but her children shipped her to a nursing home
too caught up in the system,
we forgot to visit, then forgot to support the clinic.
planned obsolescence got us marching behind carrots
disconnected from our essence,
respect for the sweat of parents parents
when the sage sits still, breathes and waits,
watching branches sway in breeze as She rotates
And while I speak my truth,
Earth, She slips away,
Football fields of forest uprooted each day.
lands once cherished,
now its parrots flee their cindered homes in disarray.
They say, 'If a tree falls down and no one hears it, did it fall?'
But if our greed trawls all the fish out the sea, can they respawn?
So I imagine Earth as a human being,
beaten and mistreated,
not quite defeated
but sees her cancer isn’t retreating.
It’s in us. Can’t you see it.
Metastatic scars of suburban sprawls,
endless traffic, cars, cities with pall
An influx of industry, grown in excess.
and abscesses
diffuse
into lakes til all beautiful bounties are abused
So Let me restate:
Football fields of forest toppled each day.
Brazil seeks higher peaks. The US eats meat, so exchange the Amazon’s natural feats
to complete a cycle that makes Her weak.
Football fields of forest plowed each day
feeding cows and pigs to gorge our son and daughters,
so they can reach the protein quotas westered doctors ordered.
What’s vested in our selection for slaughter?
merciless we are, says the rest of biota.
Football fields of forest mangled each day.
While we praise touchdowns with burgers and hot dogs, the American way,
The issue isn’t sports, I’m all for it
but the culture that supports it, we gotta abort it,
Athletic bodies sculpted to media notions of perfection
the world we now live in, neo-natural selection
in this American dream, I wake to see the land of debris, and home of the slaves.
produce wrapped in plastic,
package our harvest with war-causing byproducts.
Oil.
Not that salad dressing with beets and balsamic
I’m talking black soot in beaches on par with atomic bomb havoc
the pelicans can’t even vomit cuz it clogs their beaks and stomach
And yes. $300 billion in plastic profits last year. dirty money CEOs, gilded are their pockets,
u best bet when Earth breaks to shake us they’ll be the first to jump ship on rockets.
And where will you be?
Throwin the towel? or campaigning
to end global warming while eating methanating bodies, I call hypocrisy?
You and I, we gotta see interconnections of our system.
Because downstream from our purchase flows septic murder of the victims.
And we do the worst like they’re worthless,
a windowless warehouse serves its purpose,
to distance A from E so we just see slabs of cow muscle cut seductively
I’m telling you. This addiction, it’s sadistic,
propagandad feeding like turkeys plead for their own crucifixion
conceived for the sheer purpose of Thanksgiving,
while companies monitor revenue off the corpses of the living.
And we’re all guilty, but we can all make a difference.
If our hearts open up, our world’s crying, can we listen?
So when I think how we get out of this position.
I try to answer the question:
in what ways have I been conditioned?
The Greed of Seaweed
Seaweed.
A term used for an outsider who settles in Bimini.
Seaweed comes, seaweed goes. Some stay to nourish the land (seaweed is a natural fertilizer), and others wash-up for moments before getting swept out to new destinations.
Honestly, I can't blame the overt or subtle repulsion towards outsiders on the island. Tourists arrive with extravagance and dispose of US-brought goods as trash before thrusting their tri-engine boats--overstuffed with Bahamian harvested seafood--back home.
"But we spend money!
"Bimini needs us, otherwise they wouldn't be asking us to buy things from them."
"I need a weekend getaway from Miami, but I don't want to lose the perks."
As a fellow species of seaweed, I would like to be of the nourishing type that can be put to use. That vegan sushi roll type of seaweed. Seaweed will surely return, but for now it is gone with the currents.