To Trevor and whomever it may concern

The glass I regularly drink iced tea in

at my regular coffee shop is broken.

Not like the resilient planet we live on –

it’s just the people here that are half-cracked.

Plastic is what we think we can rely on

as if there were no tomorrow.

And now today is more disposable than yesterday.

Oh, I know that it’s craziness to think

that there is literally a last straw

and that just one more disposable

plastic glass will break the planet’s back.

But it’s even crazier still to think that every little thing

that we do or don’t do doesn’t matter.

If you add up and compound every

inconsequentiality and then you finally end up with nothing –

or at least nothing of any consequence,

then we all are certainly entirely too crazy to live on this planet –

anyway.

So I sat down on the sunlit sidewalk

and drew a round nearly round sun

with pointy rays in bright chalky hot pink chalk

for a little girl that I know only just a little.

She told me that the sun was supposed

to be yellow and of course she was and is right

and she is, of course, less cracked because she is so much younger

and so much more innocent than my old and negligent self.

I said that maybe it could be a flower and I drew

a long purple stem winding away from one side.

Only then it looked more like a kite or a prickly balloon

and so I added two three-toed pink feet

to the end of the purple strand and by then

it wasn’t clear what we had

besides a lot of colored chalk on the sidewalk.

And so I drew a single green eye

in the middle of the slightly sun-warmed pink circle

with curling green lashes

not unlike lashes so many little girls do have

but not necessarily green - and then I told

the little girl that it was a microscopic sea creature.

And do you know what?

The little girl smiled at me.

Who knows what she was thinking? – Indeed!

I like to think that I’m only half-crazy,

but I hope it’s the good half

of this crazy little thing that matters.

It might be love or it might be the deep blue sea.

Not everything matters as much

as the next thing, but if we are unable to pretend

that some choices matter a little

and that sometimes,

with a little help from our friends,

some choices might indeed add up to a life

worth living – well then …

You can call me crazy if you want to,

but if iced tea in plastic glasses is sanity,

I would rather make chalk drawings for little girls.

And maybe one day we will all wash away

in the very last rain that a human eye will ever see.

Or maybe, as her mother drove off the asphalt

in their dusty fossil fueled van into unseen exhaust,

that little girl powered down her window

and she merely called out to me ‘I’m your future.’

Or maybe she really just shouted ‘good-bye’ to me

and I merely called back to her to ‘have a good day.’  

Or maybe I wished her ‘a good life.’

Whatever I said really didn’t much matter –

after all.

You know, the climate didn’t change

very much on that blue sky morning -

but it was nevertheless her smile that mattered

and it is that little green eyelash of a girl that still does –

to me.

So if I have a choice, I’ll drink iced tea

from a glass glass,

even if it doesn’t do the planet

any particular good -

and maybe – just perhaps –

little things matter.