Pine Cone
A poem for America
Stop flushing your flushable wipes.
Your pipes and sewers are filling
with monstrous clogs: fatbergs of floss,
hair, tampons, and condoms,
and of course, those flushable cloths
that are supposed to dissolve but don’t.
Who finds war more profitable:
the shovel industry
or the maker of body bags
or the maker of remote controlled bombs
or the suppliers of copper and steel
for the shrapnel that encases and embodies
remote control bombs?
Is America a twelve-year-old girl
crying as she measures out the rope
to live-stream her suicide,
or is she the girl sobbing in her mugshot
after being arrested for the kidnapping
and torture of a disabled man?
Why are you doing this?
Why are you hiding a gun in your luggage?
Why are you creating mountains
of K-cup plastic trash
in the era of the robotic vacuum?
Death has always been automated.
Yet, somehow humanity persists
like a parking garage that reeks of piss
like an addiction to klonopin
like a forest that has to set fire to itself
in order to thrive.
