American Hunger

Staving off hunger (an American Diatribe)

Sometimes when you are starving
For love or money or food
You will go to great lengths
To stop feeling the absence
Of whatever the longing
Implies
Some people buy food
The way they buy
Clothes
Putting as much in their
Pockets and mouths
As they can stand
They hunger for war
And oil and conflict
And vegetables
And money to pay
For strippers
And beer
There. Hunger is denied
By the needs of others
When does your body
Need more than mine?
Do we squabble over leftovers?
My thirst is the same as my hunger
Except it only wants water and wine
Jesus made water into blood on the cross
And for him we pollinate the world with
Our starvation
Hunger is a matter of not being full
Of needing to consume forever
The land and the soil
Cannot produce enough
Compost and we recycle
So that we can keep putting off
The next line in the poem
Fecal rust and poison dust
Live while we eat each other
Rats in a cage too much of everything
But Jesus.

Why did I love to eat?
Was it a symptom of something?
A steak and beer
Injured cow screams for it’s death
Somehow I don’t mind.
Are we all primates indeed…
That we would satisfy our hunger
At the expense of both wolves and deer
And ecosystems
Violence towards nature is slow and
Brutal
But nature is slow and brutal as well
Where is my Beer?
Jesus fell at his mothers breast an cried
“why did we fail?”
God looked down and wept/
The Earth stood silently turning \
While hunger spread from land to land….
And factories belched black smoke
Of animal flesh and chemicals.
The golden arches spread
From gas station to polluted burg.
And the flag waves happily in the dappled sunlight
Over the starving angular bodies of children
World wide.
This is our legacy
Hunger
Starvation
Of the soul.