This Suburban Child Yearns for a Stereotypical Post-Apocalyptic World Overgrown with Weeds

Someone mowed the field.
They shouldn’t have:
it had grown so full and free
the last time I jumped
the fence and wandered
its perimeter, dandelions
and lemongrass kissing
my ankles. The school closed
a few months ago. No longer
did children roam its hallways,
but still the field flourished,
growing grander every day,
waiting for someone to bruise
an elbow or knee against
its burgeoning chest.
They should have left it alone.
Let the grass grow
until it reached their knees,
torsos, and eventually their brows,
so they would be wading
rather than walking through
grass. There would be dynasties
of insects — ladybugs, june
beetles, crickets, and grasshoppers
that would jump and chirp
and fill the tired days
with song, silent as past
springs had become
with the indiscriminate
scattering of iridescent toxins
to every inch of arable land,
killing not only hexapods
but rodents, lizards, birds, fish,
the humans consuming said fish —
a middle finger to life itself.
Ivy would cover the surrounding
buildings like veins and burrow
deep into the concrete
heart of the library, where,
in fourth grade,
an eternity ago,
I played a soldier
painting the roses red
and white and red again
for the pleasure of some inane
monarch, the monarch in this story
being the human eye itself.
Buds would sprout from
cracks in the blacktop
and in time coyote, deer,
lizards, bluejays, squirrels,
shrews, and mice would rise
from the nearby creek
to reclaim the plastic play
structures now accompanied
by adolescent redwoods —
we could have all this.
But we cut our lawns
to our preferred lengths,
empty our compost bins,
and wipe the counters clean. Living
here, in LA, in the heart
of a city that trades redwoods
for streetlights and bushes
for benches, I am weary
of asphalt, of litter-
ridden parks as the only
bits of green around.
I would rather have lemongrass,
ivy, and birdsong, infinitesimal —
though I do admit all these
would have, could have,
should haves are still
for the sake of the human
child, who wants hot showers,
polyester shirts, airplanes,
and suburbs as much as he wants
a play structure draped with vines;
who, as soon as he bores
of wading through tall grasses,
will enter the shower and scrub
the dirt from his ankles, leaving
the crickets, the deer, and the birds
behind to emerge
from their twilight hideaways…
and the moon will bear witness
to what the human will not:
the coyote extracting
the squirrel’s liver as its
eye swivels frantically
in its socket; the infidel
screams of worker ants
as they are purged
by marauding lizards;
the heaving of cyanobacteria
blooms in steaming lakes
no less bustling with life
than a field of dandelions
as the sun, in a billion years,
swallows mars, boils
oceans, and sets all this
good green
naturalness ablaze.