Ode to Paper

POETRY

by Deborah Unter

Oh Paper, you must hate us; 

sitting in the side pocket of my barbie lunch box, delivering my mothers love: 

your one and only purpose before your untimely expiration. 

Those lifeless spotted i’s, staring at the ceiling next to someone’s rotten apple core. 

Maybe if i was a better kid, you’d be sitting in a shoe box with your brothers and sisters, 

maybe if we were a better species you’d be a branch swaying in the wind, 

the poet, not the messenger. 

In 100 years, how many of your friends will go down the wayside? 

Your friends named Birth Certificate and First Exam and Love Letter and  

Airplane and Painting and Marriage Contract and Postcard and  

Birthday Card and Fortune Teller and Divorce Statement and Will and 

Death Contract.  

Buried in a mass grave, just decomposing amongst our discards  

like none of it mattered anyways, 

covered in paint and tears and wrinkles and dust. 

You remind me of the chicken nugget on my plate, 

Disguised but shroud in death 

(ketchup after all, always seemed like blood), 

I gave them up this year, to “save the planet”, 

yet walk along a corridor of cut carcasses paraded in plastic 

some still smelling of murder. 

Thinking of childhood: 

forced to consume the products of a society I never asked to join. 

Sickening, and sold! For just $5, what a bargain. 

The clown smiles on shaky stomachs, 

giving our money to mass murder machines, 

fried cows in a grill, blood vessels bursting resemble body parts bursting in desolation. 

Scorching everything in sight, is it too apologist to ask 

if I may repeat “a society I never asked to join”? 

Early Morning Paper brings the news so disgusting. 

But! hope is so delicious. 

Clean and white and new, 

begging us to turn the page and start from scratch. 

Begin our lives anew, 

With every dot, line and swirl, oh paper, we colonize you 

Finding fatal fallacies in faded ink, there is nothing nice in our niceties. 

Even as we paint pristine portraits and sign our names, 

countless sheets crumpled up next to 

orange peel and old shoe and dog waste. 

And yet we hear you seemingly urge us to  

Fill you up 

Color you in  

To put our pencil or paintbrush on your clean white surface and ruin you, 

Like we’ve ruined everything that was once not called paper or plastic or wood. 

But spoke of life.