We buy all this food.
Thousands of acres of grapes and rolled oats before they are rolled.
We buy the banks of the Mississippi and the tundra between one Serengeti
and another Mojave.
Sometimes, on a whim,
I go out and get a shopping cart of bones and water.
The kids can’t get enough.
They eat and sing and fart and blow.
It’s endless.
That’s the one thing about being a parent
that no one every mentions. Massive consumption.
An endless loop of Western Civilization,
of American thievery and piggery.
Twelve acres of Ho-Hos.
Thirteen thousand bottles of Twitter tweets.
I am sure there are kids in other worlds that have no idea
the barrel of stuff, which lives in the front yard.
I want to go there. Wherever that is.
With my kids.
Sit them down inside the inside of a mud hut
or a stone building and say look.
There’s one dinosaur in the corner. That’s it.
Her name is Francois
and then there is the grass.
Hours and hours of grass, right outside.
Go to it.
Be in it.
Soft and quiet and wild.
Make boats and computers and oceans and blankets.
Then, when you come home hungry and tired
we will eat the same chicken and dates,
those and figs and moonbeams
and that will be everything.
No joke.
It will be all you get.

*

Matthew Lippman‘s most recent collection, MESMERIZINGLY SADLY BEAUTIFUL won the 2018 Levis Prize and will be published by Four Way Books in 2020. He is the founder of the web based resistant project, Love’s Executive Order, www.lovesexecutiveorder.com.