A Plastic Pandemic

Looking back to 1969 the words seem prophetic
“He’s got a plastic heart, plastic teeth and toes,
plastic knees and a perfect plastic nose.
He’s got plastic lips that hide his plastic teeth and gums”..
so sang the Kinks then about their plastic man.
Now in the twenty-first century it seems he’s here
as plastics ingested from our food,
and inhaled in from the air we breath
are becoming part of our bodies,
part of ourselves
to be inherited
by our children.
We’ve filled every hole in the ground
with our plastic waste, our plastic excesses
and soon the sea will be transformed into plastic land
Now we re-cycle it by the shipload from rich places to poor,
to places where the people don’t matter,
where “plastic man don’t feel no pain”.
There we dump it on the newly plasticised people
in the plastic land we’ve created for them.

First published in Topical Poetry, January 16, 2022