Plastic Pipeline

 
“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 in 1969.
 
Now in the twenty-first century it seems he’s here
as plastic gushes everywhere
over land,
over sea
and into our very being
as plastics ingested from our food,
and inhaled in from the air we breath
become part of our bodies,
part of ourselves
to be inherited 
by our children.
 
We fill every hole in the ground
and soon the sea will be transformed into plastic land.
We re-cycle it by the shipload from rich places to poor,
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.

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges/ekphrastic-writing-responses-benjamin-von-wong