The snow shivered in the heat
Tears fell from crystalline eyes
so white . . .
. . . the mountain gathered them up
and let them roll down his back to
the river . . .
. . . the river said ,"I'm overpool but I will make room for one more . . . or thousands  . . .
The crystalline tears mingled with the red mud and became blood brothers . . . and they flowed to the mighty sea . . .
. . .  "Welcome to my domain my little one's . I knew your forefathers and mothers from long ago . Here you will do my bidding as long as you stay . Here my windy friends will make froth out of you . And my big brother Sun will bake you and my sister Moon will entice you with dreams that can never be . All are here to test you , burn you , pull you apart , toss you around until you are ready to follow in your parents footprints . . .
. . . so the Sun scorched and the wind blew hurricanes in the east and typhoons in the west and the moon by night gave false hope in the way of impossible dreams and the ancient Sea watched all without saying a word . . . .
. . . then came the day the Sea was satisfied and said ,"Leap up my little ones , your day has come , ride the clouds to your new home . Some to the north , some go to the south , the rest go east and west . Take your precious gift to the land who is dying for your taste ." And one by one the tears lept into the clouds and ladened it's burdens and the winds cartied them away to the Plains and Forest and Valleys and to the Mountain Top . There the tears fell and froze and collected on the north face of the
mountain and the mountan was was glad .
"Welcome home my lost little one's . I'm so happy I could cry ." . . .  and he did .

You are the cause of your own suffering*
I tell myself everyday,
but I still bathe in silt and shame.
Rinse. Recycle. Repeat.

I tell myself everyday
how mundane it is to be redundant:
Rinse. Recycle. Repeat.
Everybody that looks at me sees

how mundane it is to be redundant.
You only get one masterpiece;
everybody that looks at me sees
that's not a rainbow, it's an oil spill.

You only get one masterpiece,
but I still bathe in silt and shame -
that's not a rainbow, it's an oil spill.
You are the cause of your own suffering.

I’m nothing but ink
I’m bleached pulp dyed blue and red
Recyclable

I have never liked the term

      "sloppy seconds"
                  
                  I believe that we renew ourselves with each love

The little black book I keep next to my journals sits on a bookshelf I made from recycled wood. A fresh coat of paint may hide a splintered past unknown to me, but that is of zero importance when refurbished trees that died for a purpose hold books containing paper collected from a different tree that is now dignified in service.

One that expands as more hot air is blown, and shrinks when cold shouldered. The little black book holds numbers without faces, but the pocket in the back holds a face that could never be confused as paint by number.
It maps out the girl I've been searching for that never deserved a page in this book of lust, only the pocket in the back that will one day accept my trust.

And the reason this little black book is kept on the recycled bookcase is because the paper is also recycled, the same as the trash that litters the pages.

Personality problem monumental
Attempts to change inconsequential

Learning to care
A constant struggle

Desperation to scream
Producing nothing but mumbles

A freshly broken heart
Can make one so humble

Mind pollution
No abatement

Dissolving solution
Emotional Contagion

Recycled love
Halfhearted statements

Am I enough?
Romantic damnation

~Many people rely on the convenient, easy ways of living in this age of fast food, plastic packaging and rapid development. Most people do not care to see why they live the way they do or what it takes to live in such a way. Toxic pollutants leaching into our earth and water should not be worth the convenience! Third world women working in dusty, cramped factories to make designer purses for fifteen year old girls. Garbage is America’s biggest export and it ends up in China, on the coast of Somalia... anywhere that American citizens won’t be bothered to see it.

~What does it mean to buy a pack of plastic razors? Some metal, some chemicals, some plastic, more plastic for packaging. Use a razor a few times and toss it in the garbage. Somewhere, maybe at La Chureca, someone will pull the rusted metal and plastic from the landfill. They might make one US dollar per day collecting scraps of aluminum, glass, plastic and other scrap metals. What does it mean to wear deodorant? The plastic stick isn’t reusable. The ingredients are highly toxic. Aluminum-based antiperspirants have been linked to Alzheimer's and cancer. Soap comes in plastic bottles, coffee makers made of plastic, water bottles made of plastic… hell, my plastic shower curtain came wrapped in plastic packaging.

~Americans are lucky. Indoor plumbing with quality water. Green lawns and exotic flower beds. Buy and use, throw away and repeat. Big corporations pay off politicians to pollute. Industrial waste, land erosion, low air quality, pesticides. Why are we so quick to trust an artificial sweetener being promoted by a company that makes poison? They call you a hippy, a conspiracy theorist. They tell you that you only live once and to stop being so worried about it all. I ask them, how can you look away? Deforestation and destruction are all around. Those that profit are not concerned with what happens to the land after the loggers and miners have left the ground scarred and desolate.

~Modern living is a hoax. Yeah, you get around quick in your car but at what cost? Carbon dioxide, greenhouse gasses choking us and everything alive that lives with us and cannot speak. Can’t you walk to the corner store? Can’t you grow a few things in the garden or in the windowsill? When was the last time you saw a sunset and didn’t take a picture of it? Dairy cows packed together so tight they can’t turn around for your glass of milk. The disconnect is everywhere. Overpopulation. Overconsumption. People don’t care.

~They can choose. They can choose paper over plastic. They can buy a water filter instead of 20 plastic bottles. They can bike to work. Anyone can lessen their impact, anyone can think more deeply and live more sustainably. But we’ve made it so easy to be lazy. We’ve become so dependent that we’re forgetting to use technological gains to make the way we do things better. We’ve come so far that we’re forgetting what brought us here.

~

‘We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire – a crackpot machine – that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate.’ Edward Abbey

‘In the developing world, the problem of population is seen less as a matter of human numbers than of western overconsumption. Yet within the development community, the only solution to the problems of the developing world is to export the same unsustainable economic model fuelling the overconsumption of the West.’ Kavita Ramdas

‘Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.’ Jacques-Yves Cousteau

‘Globalisation, which attempts to amalgamate every local, regional, and national economy into a single world system, requires homogenising locally adapted forms of agriculture, replacing them with an industrial system – centrally managed, pesticide-intensive, one-crop production for export – designed to deliver a narrow range of transportable foods to the world market.’Helena Norberg-Hodge

‘Throughout history human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonise-destroy-move on.’ Garrett Hardin