Craig Kurtz: Kipple

Craig Kurtz · Kipple

“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it.” —Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

You might as well just acquiesce —

it’s forgone as we go to press;

detritus, as a common law,

will scrouge its masters, the bourgeois.

At first, it seemed a lovely thought —

all of those goodies that we bought;

and then in time it seemed that we

might get squished by our own debris.

It was a boon, it was a boost,

that gubbish everyone produced;

it was assumed to float away,

not get congested more each day;

but, frankly, when all’s said and done,

we drivel by the megaton.

We love it when we’re middle-class

and no one suffers from tear gas;

we throw our data in the trash

which keeps the third world flush with cash;

but it’s a botheration, dear,

this gumming up the biosphere.

The pistons and the turbines hum

producing more effluvium;

the gears of industry won’t stop —

that moderation’s been a flop;

just pop it in the microwave,

the very planet we would save.

When shopping for a better you,

recycled universe or new,

all kipple leaves a residue —

the gubbish google déjà vu.