What We Take Away, The Children Cannot Even Miss

Take away the cooling shade beneath those great old trees

I’m sure I can find a place to rest somewhere beside the roaring highways

Take away the moonless nights when the Milky Way appears in all its glory

Maybe I can sleep beside those dumpsters out behind every convenience store

Take away the quiet that was the always natural state of things

I will drift off to the angry bellowing of monstrous trucks and childish motorcycles

Take away the open spaces where the buffalo and the Indian once roamed

Perhaps I can still walk with the great spirit thru the coal mines and across the oil fields

Take away the woody lakes where I swam in soft, clean water

I will cleanse myself in the rivers where many others wash and drink and piss and dump

Take away the little stores owned by the people from my own town

Certainly corporate wisdom will always provide for me all that I could ever need

Take away the need for kids to run all day in the woods when the leaves are turning

Let them come of age supine upon our couches, totally immersed in vapid electronics

Take away the jobs we did with our hands and with our brains

We will gamble away our futures, high on homemade or prescription drugs

Take away our fathers off to jail and let our mothers work the streets high on Crank

We can find our own way alone until Jesus introduces us to a new family, in prison

Take away the smell of moist soil and thick sweet grass

I will breathe deeply of the fumes coming off the thousand passing vehicles per hour

Take away the songbirds that often woke me on those childhood summer mornings

Let our children wake to the sounds of airplanes and angry traffic

Take away the merciful thunderstorms that cooled us as we worked hot summer afternoons

I can stay inside, in dank and mold-ridden, fully air-conditioned comfort

Take away that wondrous smell of a healthy forest after a generous rain

Let me partake in the odor of stale urine as I walk dark alleys filled with trash

Take away the families living on the same farm for many generations

We will surely prosper with ConAgra and Monsanto acting as stewards of our bountiful lands

Take away the trails we took up through the beech trees behind the lake

Put up million dollar ‘cottages’ for colonies of loudly-vapid salesmen from far off cities

Take away the glaciers that stored our water high up on Andean and Himalayan peaks

Bring the malaria and dengue fever far north so that we all may share

Take away the good for sleeping quiet of the middle of the night

Get drunk and loud and leave butts and broken bottles strewn upon the ground a 2AM

Take away the roadside stands selling tomatoes, watermelons and peanuts

Bring in the food from soulless factories in dirty semis roaring down the rundown interstates

Take away the sleepy pre-dawn hour with its birds and growing colors

Turn on bright lights and television and drive away sipping coffee, prattling on your phone

Take away the leopard frogs we could hear in every marsh and pond

Not to worry, whatever killed them off probably won’t bother our kids at all

Take away the children happily riding bicycles to their schools

Let paranoid mommies secure them in SUVs idling obesely in long lines at the bus stops

Take away those costly engineers and instead breed salesman and accountants

We can find our truth and guidance in simplified versions of a modern bible

Take away our veneration of education, determination and hard work

The illiterates can all play basketball, do hip-hop or star in the latest, short-lived extreme sport

Take away any dignity and all sense of purpose from our once-revered elders

We can all eventually totter off to drugged care by immigrants, mumbling incoherently to ourselves

Take away the long and killing, cleansing frosts that we knew from cold winters past

We’ll have more time for outdoor wreckreation, absorbing carcinogenic UV rays

Take away the language that bound us together from coast to coast and north to south

I will fear and mistrust those l aughing among us whom I cannot understand

Take away the habitat which sustains our beloved charismatic mega-fauna

Let the peasants squat in the remaining dirt, carrying dirty water and cooking out of cans

Take away our privacy, give us all IDs and secretly spy on the kids library internet

Inflate the insane terrorists and whip up a righteous fear to keep us all in line

Take away the ancient spring time clock of the birds and bugs and trees

The rats, flies, roaches, cats, dogs and goats will prosper - For a while…

Take away any part of the landscape from which you might wring a quick and dirty buck

We can camp among the invasive species as they slowly reclaim our mindless waste

Take away the dignity everyone should obtain from their life’s work

Reduce us all to a never-ending search for the cheapest, quick and dirty labor solutions

Take away the haunting memory of a loon’s cry on a northern lake

Tumble a thousand advertising images together incessantly in our minds

Take away the things we learned staring for hours out slow-moving open car windows

Give us DVDs with sweet and salty grab-its in our $50k SUVs, just like we have at home

Take away the father I never knew from my teenage, bastard mother

I will take my first term in jail to perfect my craft, as soon as I come of legal age

Take away the family doctor we could afford with our own checkbooks

Let us die pointlessly in our own wastes of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and hypertension

Take away the home-cooked meals we shared every night, gathered with our families

We can grab something supersized on the way, stuff it down in the car and toss the waste

Take away the animals from which the native people drew their spirits

They can find their paths to modular welfare homes in financed pickups they cannot afford

Take away the vision of the new moon and a million stars in the night

We can wonder at the beauty of all the city lights that destroy our natural rhythms

Take away the roadless places from which we drew comfort at our jobs

We can still envision the West as it was…watching those old cowboy movies

Take away my need to think for myself and nourish me with sound bites

I will continue to believe in that wondrous and eternal Morning in America

Take away the Spring floods and build backlit fountains at desert gambling casinos

Bury me in the once good silt gone toxic that now threatens your magnificent dams

Take away the so-called frozen wastes that we once called the Arctic

The Inuit can work in tourism, development and, maybe e-commerce customer support

Take away the mighty and warm-blooded giant bluefin tuna

Let them make their sushi from muddy pond carp, filthy tilapia and poisoned farmed catfish

Take away the incredible biodiversity we never had time to even catalog

Let China and India take great pride in competing to be the world’s most populous lands

Take away these things very slowly and it will not be so very painful

Take away all these things and those who might follow us will not be able to miss them