Everything was
Alive and Dying
(2016 political edit)
Janet Kuypers
written 1995, edited 6/23/16
I know I don’t do much,
I don’t do enough
but I’ll take what I can get
when I have these bad dreams
of our country going down the tubes
and all I can dream about
is the reality of my hands tied behnid my back
and thre’s nothing I can do
and after every night
I wake up in a sweat
*
so tell me, Jeb exclamation point Bush
so tell me, Ted Cuban Canadian Cruz
so tell me, Entertainer In Chief Donald Trump
so tell me, crooked Hillary Clinton
so tell me, Barack Hussein Obama
if you lived through my dreams,
if you saw things the way I do —
would you be in a sweat, too?
You know my motives aren’t selfless
I know that these things are worthwhile in my life:
I’d like to find a cure
to these man-made diseases
before I die of them
For example:
do you even know why
we should save the rain forest?
Oh preserve the delicate balance,
just tear the whole forest down,
what difference does it make?
Put in some orange groves
so our concentrate orange juice
can be a little cheaper
did you know that medical researchers
have a very, very hard time
trying to come up with synthetic
cures for diseases on their own?
It helps them out a little if they can first
find the substance in nature.
A tree that appears in the rain forest with a cure
may be the only one of its species.
Or one like it may be two miles away,
instead of right next to it. I wonder
how many cures we’ve destroyed
to plant more orange groves.
Serves us right.
*
I mean, I’m not just a vegetarian
because I think it’s wrong to kill an animal
unless I have to
I also know the excess protein
pulls the calcium away from my bones
and gives me osteoporosis
and the excess fat gives me heart attacks
and I also know that we could be feeding
seventeen times more people
with the same resources used for meat production
You know, I know you’re looking at me
and calling me an extremist
but I’m sitting here, looking around me
looking at the destruction caused by family values
and thinking the right, moral, non-violent decisions
are also those extreme ones
*
everything is linked here
we destroy our animals
so we can be wasteful and violent
we destroy our plants
we destroy our earth
we’re even destroying our air
we wreak havoc on the soil, on the atmosphere
we dump our wastes into our lakes
we pump aerosol cans and exhaust pipes
and you tell me I’m extreme
and I’m beginning to think
that we just keep doing it
because we don’t know how to stop
and deep inside we feel the pain of
all that we’ve killed
and we try to control it by
popping a chemical-filled pain-killer
we live through the guilt
by taking caffeine, nicotine, morphine
and we keep ourselves thin with saccharin
and we keep ourselves sane with our alcohol poisoning
and when that’s not enough
maybe a line of coke
maybe shoot ourselves in the head
in front of the mirror in the master bedroom
or maybe just take some pills
walk into the garage, turn on the car
and just
fall asleep
in the wild
you have no power over anyone else
now that we’re civilized
we create our own wild
maybe when we have all this power
the only choice we have
is to destroy ourselves
and so we do
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