Six Billion People by Tom Chandler
Ben Harper is on the radio. It’s the afternoon, I’m drinking coffee, and oh, it’s the perfect time for a poem:
Six Billion People
Tom ChandlerAnd all of you so beautiful
I want to bring you home with me
to sit close on the couch.My invitation inserted in six billion bottles,
corked with bark from the final forest
and dropped in the ocean of my longing.We would speak the language of no words,
pass the jug of our drunken joy
at being babies growing into death.Sometimes, I know, life is stupid, pointless,
beside the point, but here’s the point —
maybe we would fallin love, settle down together,
share the wine, the bills,
the last of the oxygen and the remote.