You Are What You Eat
Vi Ransel
Agribusiness.
Confined Animal Feeding Operations -
CAFOs. Concentration camps.
It takes hormones, antibiotics,
pesticides, herbicides, fungicides,
contaminated fellow-inmates' bodies,
2500 gallons of water, 16 pounds of grain,
tons of ground water-contaminating,
excrement-slurry containing
climate changing methane,
and slashing and burning the rain
forest-lungs of the planet to produce
one pound of succulent, lust-inducing
flesh on the hoof.
Torture. Terror. Conscious-as-slaughtered
in Merchants of Murders' filthy processing-abattoirs.
Incompletely stunned by mechanical bolts.
Hung by one leg upside down on metal hooks.
Slashed. Stabbed. Crying. Alive.
Skin stripped from warm bodies
pleading, wild-eyed.
Screaming. Contorted. Moaning.
Gurgling. Drowning in blood.
Suffocating. Groaning
in incomprehensible horror at the betrayal
and the incredible pain.
Disemboweled. Dismembered.
Re-assembled in white foam trays.
Injected with red dyes.
Parts wrapped in plastic.
Unrecognizable as life.
Be careful!
Putting meat in your mouth makes you an accessory
after the fact, an accomplice, a party to conspiracy
to commit pre-meditated murder for the venal pleasure
of ingesting the flesh of your victim.
You are guilty of the rape of the earth-environment
which makes your own, and all life possible.
You are not only fratricidal, but matricidal,
ecocidal and suicidal, dangerously in denial,
certifiable, a maniacal, omnicidal menace
not only to yourself and other animals,
but all of the life on the planet.
Your lust
for the holocaust of charred flesh,
the dismembered carcasses
of your brother victims-by-proxy,
rotting as your mash morsels of murder
into your ravening maw
is an addiction, a compulsion - necrophagia.
Eating the dead will be the death of you,
your children and the rest of us, too.
You are what you eat.
Be careful
what you put into
your mouth.
Author's Bio: Vi's works appear widely both in print and online. She conducts Poetry Workshops and gives readings in Central New York. Her latest chapbook is "Sine Qua Non Antiques (an Arcanum of History, Geography and Treachery).
www.opednews.com/articles/You-Are-What-You-Eat-by-Vi-Ransel-090501-590.html