Untitled (polyethylene resin code #2)

Poetry Jun 9, 2024

by Walden Hoddie

1.
Golden plastic, I knew you, when they celebrated my birth,
Inflated, reflecting many faces, much younger than they appear now,
Pulled, ripped, tattered form, you wish I speak upon mankind’s pollution,
Perhaps, begging for a solution, so that your own synthetics no longer cover these barren trees,
Litter the empty streets, so that when I stride under a million glimmering suns in the night, my company is not the plastic bag,
tumbleweed of the urbanite, accompanying the subtle sizzle of cigarette upon shallow puddle
The scraping sound of paper bag on the cold concrete, intimating that

man cannot marriage materials,

So he creates an inanimate nature, held by adhesive, nut, bolt, screw, weld,
and stitched together at the seams,
To forget that
Physical lives are made to fall apart,
Pulled, and ripped, splayed among the branches, collapsed under the bridge, taken by the waters, decomposing in shallow dirt,
Akin to the balloon inflated by transient wind, embraced by a young branch, and
My library will return to dust, eons before my bag, taken from the store, will begin to crumble, so
Let our monuments be cheapened, our statues be molded, from plastics and silicon, and perhaps,
We will be remembered

2.
Thus cheapen our monuments, and cheapen our lives, cut cost
Until perhaps we all have a little plastic and wire inside,
Our memories will be threaded in the electrical veins tacked to a dead Douglas fir
Limbs outstretched turned into stripped branches, so that when we return to retrieve its shade
there will be no place to hide
We shall become automaton flesh in the warm winds of a whir,
Our conversation will become consumables,
Ties and relationships held together by welds, at the scrappy metal fringes,
Gorged upon endless binges, depleted of energy,
We shall idle, as our skulls are reduced to a bridle for eyes,
Gazing across the novel facade horizon clasped with popcorn ceiling skies