I’m just
sitting down to breakfast;
just
hunching bleary
over my
eggs and toast and coffee,
struggling to find my
daily vertical,
fighting that
incessant growing urge to just
curl up right there.
Let sleep have its way.
Let the cats have my eggs.
It’d be great
if that was
all I had to worry about;
Who gets the eggs?
me?
or the cats?
But I’ve got to think about those eggs.
Are they free range?
Organic?
Did the chickens who laid them
lead
happy lives?
There’s nothing simple about breakfast any more.
Because vegetables and milk
are full of weird
pesticides and hormones.
And everything causes cancer,
even water.
And if it’s low-fat
it probably has some
newfangled side-effect like
anal leakage.
And meat, Jesus!
meat,
meat carries bizarre new diseases that make your
brain tissue dissolve and run out your eyeballs.
And if you think that’s all there is to it,
you live in a box,
because 8 dolphins died
for the tuna sandwich
I’m having for lunch.
My favorite candy bar displaced
4000 workers
in a small town in Ohio when
its company relocated to Mexico.
The fishermen who caught my dinner’s salmon filet
stopped off to
club some baby seals
and burn
20 acres of rain forest on the way back to port.
And the pizza place
that makes that
incredible deep dish with lots of garlic
donates money to the Michigan Militia.
SEE
I can’t have breakfast
without hurting
somebody.
All my cosmetics were tested on the raw exposed ribcage
of a live rabbit before I bought them.
All my clothes were made for ten cents an hour
by a ten year old Malaysian girl.
When I do laundry,
the detergent runs down the drain
and destroys an entire ecosystem.

The station that carries my
favorite show
won’t air pro-choice commercials.
It doesn’t want to be controversial,
but it will show
“Hope for Change” ads,
that boast an opportunity to escape being gay
The nearest dry cleaner
supports a candidate
who penned a bill
that would put the Jews back in concentration camps.
My phone company downsized
three times in the last
five years,
even though
in each one of those years,
its STOCK
SPLIT
TWICE
I’m afraid to buy toilet paper.
Who knows?
Next week
we’ll probably find they squeeze live baby sheep to make it.
And when I
fix my hair,
or drive down the street,
or turn on a lamp,

I’m probably burning more ozone,
or killing the culture of the last Indian tribe in Brazil,
or reinstating apartheid,
or giving machine guns to neo-nazis,
when
DAMN IT
all I wanted to do
was eat my
eggs and toast.