The junk truck shambles
down my street.
Billowing hot black exhaust.
Rattling like
an antique typewriter.
Modern day scavenger hunt.
Seeking forgotten treasures.
rakes and
vaccuums and
water heaters and
doors and
copper pipes.
A Vesuvian convoy
of yesterday.
Symbols of
work of
warmth or
safety of
security.
in a haphazard hill
piled atop a limping truck.
Our forgottens.
Now his tomorrow.
A thousand little lives.
Repurposed.
4 comments:
I don't know where this came from. I have had major writers block, and just threw this together. It started out as something else. I like the notion of a thousand little lives, and our relative unimportance in the world. I've been waiting to use that somewhere and it seemed to fit here.
I connect with this poem because if you ever wanted to get rid of something just put it in the alley behind my apartment on a Saturday morning. This poem obviously backs up the dictum: "One man's trash is another man's treasure."
I'm not catching the "our relative unimportance in the world" but I do catch the "thousand little lives idea" here. This poem seems to render people important because if people didn't discard their junk, what would the junk truck pick up? There's an interconnectivity here among people that I dig. Sort of like the poem about the garden where the grandson used his grandfather's tools. Unless it's destroyed, what we discard will be reused.
If this is you with Writer's Block, then I want to wring your neck. Your precise and unique descriptions always stand out to me, and there in this poem as well: "Rattling like an antique typewriter"; "A Vesuvian convoy of yesterday." I can't help but think of WALL-E when reading this.
Very visual. I really enjoyed reading this...
I like how the truck becomes an animate object as do all of the repurposed items in the last stanza.
In addition this raises ethical questions about consumption, which is extremely relevant in contemporary American culture and its "flush and forget" mentality.
Perhaps I'm over analyzing, but I also see a connection here to writing. That is, the writer puts things aside to rediscover later or "repurpose" into something else, which makes for a great extended metaphor.
Very nice.
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