garbage
garbage in the street, in the park, in the lake
garbage in the mall, the precinct, the alley
garbage in the park, the sidewalk, the piazza
crushed beer-cans, triple-glazing ad-fliers, candy-wrappers,
shopping trolleys in the pond, used condoms in the gutter
pizza cartons silting the river, tyres fly-tipping the verge
you can walk the length of the city and never touch surface,
pacing designer-H2O bottles, CDs, memory-sticks, vomit,
spent syringes, cigarette stubs, nicotine-patches, diapers,
circuit-boards, dead TVs, soiled underwear, tea-bags,
rubber bands, broken ballpoints, scratched scratch-cards,
tampons, sat-navs, weight-loss regimes, energy-drinks,
dog-shit ground into the tread of my charity-shop sneakers
junked fast-food supporting a fox & pigeon urban ecology
half-eaten burgers, cup-cakes, KFC fries, pizza-wedges
landfill garbage habitats for sugar-rush rats and obese gulls
yards piled high with obsolete torched MPV auto-wrecks
mounds of last-year’s-brand fridges & washing machines,
there are tide-locked Pacific plastic islands,
and garbage in arctic snow,
it’s our garbage that defines us and makes us human
archaeologists excavating the first signs of habitation,
find garbage in bones and shells, spoil tips and middens,
there’s space-junk garbage in orbit bright-falling as meteors
we inhale their particles alongside CFCs & petro-pollutants,
there’s bio-garbage on the moon dumped by the last lunanaut,
rusting probe-garbage on the sands of Mars… for ever
garbage
Andrew Darlington
Illustration Nick Victor