you don’t say

What’s the carbon footprint of an opinion?

A double-hairpin turn on the map, like carp caught in the Baltic, packed in Bangladesh, sold in Berlin. Turn it over and read the label. Scan the manifest, check point of origin.

Held in the mouth, an opinion is a pleasure, dense with flavour. But all fruits struggle from soil and vine, out of sight in the back. Men with cloudy heads pluck them out and pinch finger and thumb. They rub the dirt on their sleeve and take a quick sniff. Time x temperature. Not quite there.

Maybe a dash of the hysteric to finish it off. An accelerant for the log ride down the share stream.

But I suppose even dirt has a Brucie honesty. Under whose hot bulb was your darling mewling hatched?

Opinions linger in the jogger trail airspace. They stain iPhone glass. They’re dust after a disaster, overnight wafters through the square window seam. In the morning you grab the kettle and leave prints on the handle. Even under masks garbled gates move, and red dots whizz up the graph. Some say half are asymptomatic.

Opinions degrade the moment they hit air. Inside the first mouth there’s a tiny second one, a xenomorphic snarl, and another mouth inside that too, H. R. Giger’s Russian dolls.

“I’m just giving you my opinion,” he says, like he’s passing a parcel down the line, so I hold the box and smile and feel the tissue paper’s tick-tock breath.