Domestic Ordinary

I'm not making custard, she said, no use
heating up the planet and besides, I'm tired.
Fine, he said, I'll eat it without,
but we're increasing global warming anyway,
he added, with what he thought was restraint,
having just emerged sweltering with the herd
in the tube, reading (trying to) a book made of forests -
by just living and breathing — he explained, thinking
not only of carbon dioxide but the pair of pyjamas
he'd bought that day made wholly of polyester,
and wasn't that stuff made using vast amounts of non-
renewable fossil fuel? and what about the wine
they had poured from glass bottles
the pub across the street throws out by the binful
every week, or the tuna from tins, all manner
of food heat-treated, injected with antibiotics
hydrolysed, extruded, reconstituted, coloured
and shrink-wrapped, brought home in plastic carrier bags
which even now are clogging drains and sewers
and blowing across the desert sands of North Africa
in great tattery eddies which will outlast us
by hundreds of years, which will never go away,
and when will the great screw cease its turning,
its energy gradually failing in the implacable entropy
by which everything is used up or runs down,
the precious store every generation has
inherited over aeons, plundered — yet he forebore
to mention any of this and they sat down quietly to eat
their stewed fruit plain, in domestic tranquillity.