We Are Drowning, How Should We Kill Our Time?

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 Soil like the soil my ancestors grew olive trees in and so many lives rested on those branches and soil like the soil I learned how to grow strawberries in as a kid the soil I packed tight around daisies and then packed up and forgot I used to love life outside my door and moved somewhere bigger and fancier that never slept where there was no outside the door because outside the door are more Doors and you walk into smoggy insides of steel to go anywhere there are weeks I took tunnels with air conditioned air to get places never really breathing in all the way and there are years I thought I could Live in steel cars and steel hallways and steel malls everything feeding one another but all of it would be nothing if it burned down, it would have been nothing, my whole life and the footprints on pavements I've stacked my life up to accumulate here and took bigger jobs with bigger debts and lived a lifetime to fill deficits always filling deficits a slope you're trying to run up to reach the finish line but it's sloped upwards so you keep Running until your bones rust long after your curiosity for life did and I forgot there was soil when I bought food at the grocery store wrapped in plastic, cute farm animals and green fields painted on it to make you remember something you're slightly nostalgic for but can't quite see clearly through fogged glasses even when I started buying organic and local foods to tick a box that I was a good person but still I forgot about soil and that I owe my life to soil and roots and maybe they're chopping the olive trees down to burn wood for bigger houses right now and here I am across the ocean thinking wood comes from the hardware store which I hardly go to because I don't like doing things with my hands unless it's typing on keyboard keys and I think my life is so great and I put other lives under my tongue as I judge them to make mine taller but my life stands on the backs of bark and on the knuckles of dirty hands who knew soil so it is not really my life at all and I eat the toils of those who know soil when I bring any bite to my mouth and it sustains me, sustains the life I think is so tall, but it cannot be so tall because it does not stand alone, it is such an illusion that we stand alone, and I meet you again today soil when I take over an old garden plot and I meet roots and leaves and stems again and I meet seeds and the way this little spec contains entire recipes for life and I almost want to bow down to it because I've never made anything in my life, not really, and here is this thing we call so small that pumps the blood through all the veins that make my life what it is; I don't know what my life is really because I thought it was to stand the tallest and now I just want to sink it into soil