Life’s Always Been a Shell Game

The world has too much packaging,
Beginning with the first sealed cell—

As soon as lipid walls were wrapped
Around a metabolism,

Trash was bound to accumulate—
Ruptured wrappers, scraps of life forms,

Emptied envelopes ripped for stamps.
Death may have begun in hunger,

But trash began in packaging.
Corpses began as containers,

And in some cases humans make
More containers to contain them—

Urns, mausoleums, body bags,
Sarcophagi in pyramids—

Packages hiding packages.
And, if life and death are packaged,

What in the world would you expect
Of goods or even services?

It seems comical, but it’s not,
When you realize Earth’s hills are dumps,

Mountains seamed with ancient middens,
Limestone caves slowly eroding

Through hundreds of millions of years
Of built-up, flattened packaging.