From starlight and C02 – to tree
To sawmill – to pulp – to paper – to cup
Plastic dipped, stacked, transported
Separated then filled
Each stage a transition
A becoming
And then finally a blossoming
But after that joyous ascension
With the coffee consumed
The cup’s purpose drains away
An orphaned artefact
Carelessly discarded
To tumble and bruise in the wind
Clog into the verge
Where it fuels our disgust for the litterer
And gifts us the role of temple guard
But what are we guarding?
An order of human tidiness
And who are we denouncing?
One who wears their carelessness on their sleeve
We miss the irony that nature is a petty litterer too:
In the woods, beech nut husks lie in untidy heaps
Carelessly discarded by their parent trees
Raided by squirrels and mice
Who fail to tidy the wrappers of their hurried lunches
And shit where they like on a forest floor
Chaotic and visceral like truth itself
Like nature, shouldn’t we be able to drop our litter where we stand?
Yet as it spills from our fingers it slides between realms
From our stark palace to nature’s organic tangle
To land as an indigestible, alien material.
A klaxon should have sounded when the word ‘synthetic’ was coined
Think about it
About nature’s industry
About photosynthesis and respiration
About the gigatons of gasses she processes daily
And how all of this chemistry and manufacture happens inside living beings
Inside bacteria, algae, plants, and animals
Inside leaves, organs and cells
How you too contain the chemical plant, the refinery, the factory
And think about human industry
How that is made of pipes, vessels, valves,
Furnaces, smoke stacks and machines
How all this chemistry and manufacture happens outside of living beings
Chemistry without intimacy
Manufacture uncoupled from the need to be compatible with life
We accuse the litterer
But our own slate is far from clean
Our polite tidyness belies how most of what we recycle is incinerated or interred
And even before we handle our items, our industry has already ejected a thick layer of alien material
Toxic mine tailings
Ocean dwelling polythene
Mists of airborne nylon
The sediment of the anthropocene
Nature has no need of recycling points
Or colour coded bins
Her effluent is a raw material seamlessly reused
For her even death is a precious transition
A grand banquet to reclaim that which was bestowed
For us, at the end
Our bodies are an awkward material
As if themselves litter
And as with litter, we’re confused about their disposal
We either have done with the body in flames
Or box and bury it to deny its nourishing dissolution
At the close of our borrowed moment
In our most solemn ritual
We skirt nature
And aspire to be synthetic ourselves