One Poem
Refuse
It’s a good garbage pile, I said, of the orange corduroy sofa stacked with tree limbs. Absent meaning, garbage emanates. A beatific scrawl upon the morning, the city, the visionary populace leeching motor oil from the river. On the pier beyond a superstore, youth snort drugs and set assholish fireworks ablaze on ad hoc dancefloor. The end of the world heralds untoward shipping delays, consumer goods clogging oceanic harbors. A click of data systems hums a mournful song, fascinating its own tuneless concept of music. I meant there were beats per minute engineered to collapse the frontal lobe. The best song ever written was still a piano lit on fire, supplanted only by the silence of a striking garbage truck. Vague groan, low terror, undergirding the morning’s harmonious offering of golden light leaking around the perimeter of the landlord’s blackout blinds. TV-watchers, that’s who sit on sofas, green and woody stems downed in rabid storms. A pair of brown pants I own because I purchased hovers somewhere over Texas, for months, refusing to arrive.
*
Vivid textual artifacts proclaim the existence of a sweating mass. A woman I thought I loathed reveals herself as merely stupid, hollowed out by money’s vacant gleam. A psychic nonrelation to even concept of boss, having one’s hands dutifully observed by an agent of metronymic fortitude. This was the sort of surreality that made it hard, at a party, to sustain conversation. A plume of smoke issued near the domed church which served as anchoring neighborhood landmark. Psychic, groaning terror of the world experienced from a remove, afforded scenic, nearly panoramic vistas of the burning city. The cartoon fat cat lurches against city hall’s iron gates, plumped with air, secured by glued vinyl seams. It’s an astonishing weight, air, when flooded with neon particulates, smoke which weaves in cellularly to delicate alveoli. Anger could scrape raw, with a hungry throb, a puncture. A mirror tilted against a tree, reflecting weeds and a crotch in vague, genderless underwear.
*
Because I purchased, I owned the morning pile of eggs named for liberal democratic slogans: Internment Camps Are Back Eggs Florentine sauced thickly on a white plate. Beyond a certain threshold, an act of terroristic violence becomes a saner option than foamy supplication of one’s political consciousness to latex lawn signs. Less scenic vistas existed, in frantic pockets of urban solitude. What I liked was arcing off grid into dirt pile flattened by tractors, which was how I got tricked into believing I was in love on more than one occasion. Fruits burst on feeble branches, inedibly sweet and tanged with lithium. Legally, the picket has nothing to do with the protest, the garbage speaking for itself of the putrid conditions light cast upon the sacred populace. Affidavits attest with factual gravity the existence of a past action, namely a handoff. Against interpretation, the judge said, hurling a book against the so-called defendant’s agog jaw.. To be served a plate of eggs, by the court of common pleas.
*
To stop in one’s tracks, meaning refuse to chuff. Boot sunk deep in concrete becoming permanent, crusted white apostrophe. An invented you hums a brutal melody that raises the spirit of caged ghosts framed in a burnt-out building’s blackened windows. Trash bloated the intersection so thickly it became cliche. False news of bags dropped on the mayor’s lawn spread, the protest more vital in conceptual image than action. The city itself constructed with aluminum barricades an inviting zone for protesters to deposit their garbage at city hall. A bank is a dump for money, in clean, marble architectural grandeur, or the neon flicker of endless suburban dimness. Bob’s cracked basement window ushered in a swarm of flies who became too hot to fly, skulking on the floor. Orange needle tips connote urgent, commuted suffering under the elevated train. Relief, which becomes a chain.
*
Because it existed, it had a government name and stateless signatory. This was how a baby possum felt, mistaken for a rat in the bricked patio corner. A wall was built to be backed up against, by a cop commanding you to back up, against which you can back up no further. While men heckle, a tongue in a mouth multiplies, imperceptibly fattened by the fragrant meats of empire. Parties, having their own tenuous logic, against thickened routines, disrupt, with blue liquor, an evil day. A near-constant, near-silent backdrop of fireworks, like the city was an ocean with dolphins of sulfuric light leaping above its rooftops. The bear has emerged, I narrated, as the bear approached salmon gulping upriver, with horny, throbbing fervor, a livestream. A janky materiality presupposes a clean network, the youth allegedly rigging old TV sets to reduce their pixelated exposure to gleaming, 3D textures. A little ear, citrus, shriveled, constructed of sugar, promises, in marketing copy, juices that have been squeezed out.
*
A bloodthirsty moon roots around a black sack of garbage leaking dark, reddish streaks on the curb. The cockroaches, uncircumspect, hold their liquored applause. The city would drown beneath a tide of its own waste, a brute fact that astonishes. A logic of scale and heft occludes the labor and machinery that shore up the city against its own dark inverse. The mortgage foreclosure lawyers work in an office above a mostly abandoned mall where on lunch breaks I walk to contemplate the mirrored surfaces of commerce’s hollowed-out cash registers. The city as noun affords no relief to the people who live in and compose with their living its meaningful but unprofitable properties. A wind that annihilates memory cannot annihilate the artificial plants constructing an artificial town square in the center of a vacant shopping plaza, the idea of the commons bordered by two busted escalators and a juice place still pulping oranges for weary commuters. A dark echo, I mean, one’s double, cinching the knot tighter, a collar choked against a willing throat.
*
Accounting to my predisposition for being a conduit, I made as adequate a paralegal as I did a poet. The attorney’s legal advice flows through me, and is not information, but instruction conveyed with obedient tenor. This is the same thing God does a vis poems, in some dead poets’ formulations of the creative act. Another old woman poet’s death felt like a universe flickering out of existence. A librarian wheeled an abandoned cart through a tenebrous hall of graffited, empty, study carrels. At the end of the strike, the strike ends, with glum specificity. The workday hangs its banner flecked with mistletoe and sedatives. The world’s fundamental mysterious nature reveals itself, a skirt hiked up, in a clouded pool of water, in a sinkhole ripped through tarmac, in a squirrel’s gnawed skull, in the trash bag a woman dons to protect against the storm, in the tornado warning that Jill receives but not the rest of us, in the single pulsing beep of a smoke detector that falls again silent, hovering on the ceiling like a plastic halo adorning the concept of private property.
*
To be a small thief tucked in the rigging of a decommissioned naval facility turned hipster retail headquarters. A leafcutter proffering kitschy apologies for her intrusion on the leaf’s greeny duty. A decision to vacate arrives with spiritual clarity, but action requires what a mom calls elbow grease. On day six, each can acquires greater aluminum heft once emptied. The parking tickets stacked up bar entry to the civic arena. Yardwork debris presupposes an allegiance to the workyard, in anagram excess. There is no anagram for anagram, I think Dana said, whose leg bore an elegant, red circle subsuming a black, snakelike ribbon. The plague, I announced, and had to later specify which, with ratlike ferocity, human waste clotting the tracks against which life usually brutally churned. A downed tree branch derailed a train, with comradely congeniality, like a pair of open hands.
∩
Steph Cawley is a poet in Philadelphia. They are the author of No More Flowers (Birds, LLC) and My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions).