Untitled (polyethylene resin code #2

by Walden Hoddie

Golden plastic, I knew you, when they celebrated my birth,
Inflated, reflecting many faces, much younger than they seem now

Pulled, ripped, tattered form, you beckon that I speak upon mankind’s pollution,
Perhaps, begging for a solution, so your own synthetics no longer grasp these barren trees,
Litter the empty streets, so that when I stride under a million glimmering suns of 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 the paper bag on the cold concrete, intimates that
man cannot marriage materials

So he sculpts an inanimate nature, held by adhesive, nut, bolt, screw, weld, and stitched together at the seams,
To forget
Physical lives are made to fall apart,
Pulled, and ripped, splayed among the branches, collapsed under the bridge,
sifted into sediment,
Akin to the balloon cradled by transient wind, embraced by a young branch,
My library will return to dust, eons before my bag, taken from the grocery store, will begin to crumble, so
Let our monuments be cheapened, our statues molded, from plastics and silicon, and perhaps then,
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,
Limbs outstretched bundled into stripped branches,
Our memories will be threaded in electrical veins tacked to a dead Douglas fir
If you return to retrieve its shade
there will be no place to hide
We shall become automaton flesh in the warm winds of a whir,
Ties and relationships bonded by welds at the scrappy metal fringes,
Our conversation will reduce to wisps of consumables,
Gorged upon endless binges, depleted of energy,
We shall idle, as our skulls become bridles for eyes,
Gazing across the novel facade horizon clasped with popcorn ceiling skies

3.
Our plastic hands grip the stone until it becomes soft
Under the clouds, rippling across the sky,
Fishbones on a cerulean blue tablecloth
My library frayed, the ribs remain,
A record of memory, nourishing the ground which bore Nostalgia’s footsteps,
Cuticles stained, we trace a rubble,
Face wrinkled and morphed by the iridescent puddle,
Denizens to Time’s wasteland, redeemed by the providence of maggots and spores,
At the bottom of our laminated hearts
We clasp our own memory, cradled on the still hands of a Clock

Walden Hoddie is a writer.