I find myself
inclined to abbreviation and yet
I find it still
altogether too perplexed
in the white-yellow-white-yellow scrambled-egg
experience I am
busy making you telling you
this: that all my initial
vision was was pour
some fatty milk in a container,
mix up, let warm room temp, watch
it do its thing, wait some more, allowing
it wallow and impend
upon linoleum so faraway,
I absconded
to the great beyond already: now I am running errand
passive in the backseat of the pickup
truck, my mother at the wheel, veering from the pasture to the city
dump: there,
then back, then
back again unthinking of dilapidated milk
at home. The sky gripes
a little
pained at all
the earthy glut
of aggrandized trash, some
of it appliance, some of it degenerate, the rest of it
who knows what it is, once was, but all of it plainly
uniform, mingled, riveted
to others,
inured with self.
I saw a plastic skeleton glowy and entwined
with fingerprint, saw grime embellish picnic benches, defunct plastic dishware, saw
macaroni snap in 3, art contained therein sustain the
impact, intact, and hence:
I saw myself condoned
as inward flesh and outward bone: my body
was skin
and teeth by then, my hair hairs
on the back of someone else’s crooked
neck. And there was my mother, absorbed
in letting
go my plastic baby stuff
to ozone and the earth,
according corresponding
jumbo bins with some variety
of permanence.
I was despondent.
The world was riddled with description. The world let
vultures orbit over
my addled childhood
things like nothing, things
come to end on purpose: matter made
to matter
more-or-less amorphous, made
to overlook and
sanction: you
put these things there, wait,
put those things behind you, concede `
to pay a slight fee upon departure. Did not inspect the nature
of the direction we were headed home
in, until et
cetera became a point
of conversation at the gas station convenience
4 miles away: how are you, oh you
know, dropping off, et cetera, my mother and me, gazes slack
to moving, athletic colors
on screens. It goes
as follows: the smell of the city dump sticks
to your antiseptic skin and it is a stink from which
even you, patient
in the kitchenette are not
exempt. I let the milk sour
on principle, or tried my best to let
it sour. I am surpassed
by things, am
as unsurprised as before
today, before the egg-and-milk
debacle: you left, we decongested house, you came back,
pinched your nose:
“I don’t mean to be critical, but
is something rotting in here?”
It was.
Or was.
The milk’d curdled &
the day was never
so negligent
or expressed.