At the start of every month I ask my Facebook followers to suggest some writing prompts and challenges and then I post the one I chose at the end of the month. This time I picked ‘Addiction’ which was a one word prompt. What came to mind was a list poem so here it is:

Addiction

Addicted to dinosaur remains

Fossilised ideas

Dirty pleasures

Heating homes

Running cars

Getting there faster

Building roads

To better boost business

Addicted to plastic

To the convenience of forgetting

It sits in the earth forever

We breathe it in

Drink it, eat it

Feed it to babies

It flutters in trees

It drifts on the seas

Around the neck of a seal

The beak of a bird

In the stomach of a whale

Addicted to shiny new things

Neat front lawns

Weeds killed efficiently

Packages delivered on time

Addicted to right now

Addicted to cheap food

To burgers and nuggets

And penned in pigs

To horror and murder

Mined diamonds

iPhones and slavery

To turning a blind eye

To what doesn’t concern us

Addicted to capitalism

To what we need, what we want

To infinite growth on a finite planet

To investment

But not in nature

But not in the wild

Addicted to believing we are important

To slaughtered hedgerows

Felled trees

Filthy oceans

Polluted rivers

Addicted to ourselves

To speed, to need, to want, to greed

Unable to see

Addicted to the end