You’ll Be Here for a Few

Plastic’s the next oxygen.
Sit with it. The universe
Has billions of years to go.

Earth alone has billions left
To spin around our one sun,
Unless something big enough

Bowls through the solar system
And wrecks everything. Plastic’s
A twitch in this perspective,

But possibly important,
Given that anything is.
A few billion years ago,

Earth settled down to living,
Initially with little oxygen.
Early life didn’t need it

For fuel. Some life still doesn’t.
Early life extruded it
As waste toxic to that life.

You see where this is going.
We have gone this way before.
Billions of years. Billions more.