(too Many) Trees Poem by Kevin Patrick

Look at them, dawdling in moist blade mobs
Overcrowding city parks,
Ruining
paved sidewalks,
industrial iron bridges
blacktop basketball courts
and concrete garden skateboard parks
mauling their branches and vines
into our urban utopias
turning beautiful smog cities
into lost Eden's. An
Abominable virgin paradise
the land before time
wishes it forgot

Single mindedly and relentlessly
they arrive imperiously oppressively
mobilizing in swaths
around our holy relics of
happy consumerism
blocking billboards and trademarks
with durable foliage canvases
slowly growing serpentines vines
around ziggurat malls
and chain stores of churches
until their nothing more than hollow tombs
they desecrate signs of our faith
in our neon religions
rotting letters lithographs of
Nike and McDonalds
with their moss and their pomp
But most humiliatingly
they arrive quite beguilingly
spoiling our streets and mundane grass lawns
with their lushness, ostentatiousness
as if they were so special
yeah... their working for the devil



Don't be fooled by them that gleam
Their treacherous and malevolent
conspiring for eons against us
with their parasitic agenda
Building their forces up slowly
around rural peripheries
with unsubtle variations
is silent marching numbers sprout
They've been hoodwinking us to think
their hapless and defenseless
oppressed and inoffensive
victims of circumstances
but really their conspirators and conquers
congressing
in tight formations
around key strategic areas
our sprawls and all our suburbs
gathering strength and greater numbers
waiting to attack at the time you least expect it
and finally ascend from their kingdom
as the true masters of this earth
and we are their preyed
upon agriculture


Remember
there's a reason why a plant
is also called a spy


There are natural air polluters
they make too much of it
It gets so hard to think
when there's too much air to breath
it makes my blood coagulate
asphyxiate on oxygen


They have shrubs on our schools
and maples on playgrounds
they have oaks growing uptown
coming out of the sidewalks
there infesting as creepers
on suburban paper houses
Some fool even has vines
growing up on his fence
you can't escape them
not even on concrete
They slowly devour
our prettiest highways
coming through cracks
in our most trusted parking lots
dilapidated factories and mummified lots
Are your only chances of caged refuge
Outside your window
there's one watching you


Too many trees,
that's what the world has
rapacious and lecherous in voracious appetites
napalm jungles with asphalt, concrete and tarmacs
Build more skyscrapers tombstones and poor power blocks
Plant malls and boutiques, tourists traps on every street
I would like to see a garden of fast food chains
Where a boreal forests use to be raised
Smash the country into car parks
factories with tall smokestacks
There shouldn't be a speck
soiled by a leaf


Too many trees
got to wipe out this diseased
chainsaws, and hacksaw wood galore
Hydraulic cats and steel teethed backhoes
Are man's best solutions to this greed green pollution.
You think there friendly remember this;
we are nothing but baby food
for mother natures
favorite children