by Benjamin Pryor
We have never been what we have wanted to gain,
scooping our family debris, in the way
an apartment garden proudly decomposes.
Garbage fetters the flow, does not care to impose
spent smoke bombs, ruddy phlox, baby seashells,
melted crayons. Love is not tossed-out pails
but we inflect the lowly harrumph of mucking up,
billows of trash bags calm us, plastic cups.
Couldn’t someone sound alarm, push a fuzz-pad
for elevators to take us to polished beds
in an actual house? Buried patterns, the lofty
is not our station, our vaudeville is only coughed.
Burned to lonesome clinkers, wearing child boots,
lacking blooms, we are pigments, shades of soot.
