O lord of styrofoam,

we have built a continent in your image.

Amen, please grant us eternal life.

All sacrifices are quid-pro-quo.

Faustian market pressures.

Foucault described for us

the aesthetic of chain-link,

feasibility of happy endings.

Damn shame that god blew the CGI budget

on a few unidentified winged things.

The gravesite of an albatross

is identifiable not by the bones,

but by the mound of plastic

its stomach leaves behind.

Lately, my own piss glows from the vitamins.

or heavy metals.  Bioaccumulation

of guilt.  The morning’s architecture

of stillness.  We are what we require

most:  a catastrophe of objects.

We could do worse than sacrifice

for the sake of something beautiful. 

Tomorrow will forgive our disinterest

with a locust breeze.  We owe a decorum

at least.  Cocaine in the Thames

is another problem eels don’t need,

an expert says.  It’s giving trickle down

with a Mad Max scarcity plot.

Our ancestors believed the reward

of diligent bean-counting

was its own.  So did the Fed. 

A civilization unwilling to war

over fruit is one unable to yield

ripe bellies, sticky fingers.

Or so the memo goes. 

The spaghetti network of

trans-continental service

cables is impervious to

terrorism, but highly

susceptible to sabotage

by curious marine organisms.

Proximity is born by infrastructure,

warm liquids.  Mankind has grown

too reliant on calcium; saltspray,

ceramics. We at once have language

to name tragedy, but not enough

to speak it out of existence.  “Sorry”

would be a good word to say

to the whales, I think. 

There are others, too.