1. I was sitting in Starbucks staring into my Espresso Macchiato and thinking about the fecal matter stuck to the bottom of my shoe when it occurred to me that dog crap is only metaphor for real shit.
2. Real shit is the wealthy business man who purchases a first class ticket to Cambodia in order to rape a ten-year-old enslaved in a brothel from which there is no escape.
3. Real shit is the mountain of refuse on the outskirts of Manila that regularly avalanches down to bury the children skipping rope below.
4. Real shit "happens" all right, but lets not diminish that truth with a dumb shit sticker tacked onto the bumper of a chunk of metal spewing real shit into the life-sustaining air we breathe.
5. Real shit "happens" because we allow it, dispense it, toss it, fan it, eat it, smoke it, sling it, and imagine it into existence.
6. Real shit begins when the sperm of greed meets the ovum of dark fantasy and births naked carefree indulgence.
7. It's not what a human ingests and which later drops into the latrine that equals real shit, said the Rabbi; it's what oozes from the dark corners of the human heart that stinks up the world.
8. Hitler's real name was Adolph Shitler. Mao's real name was Mao Tse Dung. Stalin's real name was Joseph Shitionovich Stalin, otherwise known as Little Shit. But despite their atrocities, let us not think that we are less capable.
9. Real shit is the 10 acres of tin foil manufactured each day to wrap eighty million Hersheys Kisses made of chocolate originating, by the way, from the Ivory Coast cocoa farms where child slaves work 100 hours a week making us happy on Valentine's Day.
10. We are shit athiests refusing to acknowledge the existence of shit we can't see. Which is why the plastic pebbles swirling in the Pacific now cover Hawaiian beaches and catch in the throats of gulls and crabs but don't really bother us much.
11. Real shit isn't the dog feces on the bottom of the shoe. Real shit is the shoe on the top of the dog feces made of materials that won't decompose any time soon.
12. Real shit is the plastic straw and styrofoam cup into which I stare in my daily Starbucks ritual.
13. But then again, who really gives a shit.
Wow. Great intense poem/treatise.
ReplyDeleteAnd I am also impressed by how this was expressed, Ed, in a voice that is clearly yours and yet not in a form that feels familiar from you.
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