before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world.
-Martin Luther King Jr.
polyphonic murmurings
the city speaks
even while it sleeps.
we are more than ourselves
the sum of our parts
is the larger part of something.
the whole world is allegorical.
our coffee is a miracle of globalization:
a seed is planted,
years later little nimble fingers harvest the cherries:
roasted, processed, it arrives across oceans, hot java,
we sip its velvety elixir & go about our day.
wearing bluejeans, crafted from swaths of denim in a factory
somewhere on a map in a county we’ve never been to.
we transport bodies in oiled machines that run on the commerce of drilling,
& eat our lunches in the break rooms of silent killings.
a solitary pig travels from farmactory to the killing fields.
we eat the animal we never could never know,
walk our dogs after, pet our cats, & yet,
all our bellies buzz with bellowing hunger.
we are all hungry for love, for comfort, for the workings of everyday niceties.
there is no human that is not a part—however apart—of the cacophonous pulling of all things.
the exploding of ourselves is like the imploding stars we’ve inherited.
we share in the cry of babies & the undulation of the ocean.
even if you can’t see or hear the howl of a starving child, we still play part to its cosmic tragedy.
miracles don’t end at the bottom of a coffee cup thrown casually into a recycling receptacle.
they end cause life gets in the way.
PAUL WATKINS 
A lot to think about.