COST OF LIFE IN SILICON VALLEY

Alone in air-conditioned SUV’s the drivers

Pulse through the clogged arteries of commerce

Like rosary beads amid titanic trucks and gargantuan car-carriers

Spewing tons of toxic fumes into an atmosphere heavyladen with sickening smog.

They swarm like tenacious ants over the faulted earth

Touching without feeling

Talking without communion

Breathing without living.

Their children have never stepped into a fresh cow pie

Or munched sunwarmed carrots from a backyard garden

Walked barefoot through a meadow in dewy dawn

Or gaped in wonder at the Milky Way.

Nature lies buried beneath the shuddersome sameness of colorless apartments

Overlaid by pitchblack parking lots of outsized shoe-box megamalls

Leaving only barren hillsides and sterilized lakes

Where once wild things roamed at will.