Pseudo-Rant: Paper Talks

Paper Talks
***
how many trees died
so you could send Valentines
to people you're romancing
this year, while
last year's garbage contains
the remains
of the cards you've discarded?
hemp
makes better paper, and
grows back faster
than a clear-cut forest
shipped to a paper mill--
but, back in the McCarthy Daze,
playing on "Reefer Madness," hemp
was made illegal,
and now the War on Drugs continues
the chant that cannabis is bad,
so we can't allow hemp to be grown.
if a tree falls in a forest
with lumberjacks, chainsaws, chippers,
and paper mills all around,
who knows if it makes a sound?
if walls could talk, imagine what paper
would say? the very pages
of my notebooks, crammed full, margin-to-margin,
so another tree doesn't have to fall
for my sake . . .
p.s.--human skin
makes good parchment (and lampshades),
and what remains
makes Soylent Green,
a rather extreme way of "going green."