POEM: I USED TO BE A PLASTIC BOTTLE

I Used To Be

A Plastic Bottle

A plastic bottle I was.

Oh, I was toxic as sin!

Where once I held sweet syrup,

now it’s clovey old gin.

Along tops of high shelving,

among islands of bright white

I sang the Song of Sugar

carbonation’s sweet delight.

For a time I was toted.

I was back-packed and displayed.

I sat upon fine linens.

I was royally arrayed

with plastic cups and saucers—

all manner of plastic spew

that from the mouths of factories,

make of the newer, new.

I’d coats of many colours,

many sizes and shapes.

I was even in a movie

about a planet and apes.

It seems so long ago now,

though it’s really not that far.

(Near as your next wish is made

on that twinkling little star.)

For now I sit ‘neath roadways

where I’m filled with hootch or piss.

I thought there was some process

whereby life avoids amiss?

Knowing that I’m not alone,

brings me little comfort:

Plastic shrouds on land and sea

hardly seem  triumphant.

If I could call for justice

and a squaring of the round

do you think that I would still be here

while you’re dead and in the ground?

WELL, I'M, SURE THAT MOST OF US HAVE meditated on what it would be like if our plastic bottles could talk. For those that haven’t, I wrote this little ditty in the early teens of the Twenty-First Century (Hey! Where’s my aircar, Jetson?!). I recently saw a short doc on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (and garbages everywhere will be happy to know the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans have two patches each swirling around in their waters, while the Indian Ocean has one), and natch this poem came to mind. Environmentalism and pollution concerns are on full display, but I hope it doesn’t come across as too preachy. Besides, like a Greek tragedy, the rise and fall of a great…bottle (OK, not quite the same as a king or brave warrior but hey, go with it) is a compelling tale, don’t you think?  The bottle had pride of place in society; it had purpose and prestige. Its hubris and fall from great heights comes from its being unaware of WTF! it's doing to the planet.

     But it didn’t ask to be made. It lived its life as it was designed. Its fall was inevitable; it was designed to be thrown away. The question is, even if our bottle gained an understanding of the harm it and its compatriots were doing, what could they have done about it anyway? The harm was already ‘baked-in’, so-to-speak, when they were made, and now, the only thing Gaia can do is gird her loins and take it. And, I'm sorry for that visual, Gaia!

      The bottle’s futile call for some sort of “justice” or a wish to change what happened, or will happen, is the same cry we all make, time and again, as we’re face-planting into our own steaming pile of hubris. Hey! Cheer up! There’s time. There’s always time.

Cheers, Jake.