Your final thesis

 Read the books stack them on shelves
Pages turned by generations of obedient hands
Every conclusion has become a print, a stamp
Just fancy furniture nobody dares to rearrange

I watched the students repeat the language
placing famous names inside their sentences
Building little monuments from quotations
Repeating the bland content until it was their own mind

They forfeited their own wanting fingerprints
Their knowledge orbits around another person
Fear of their own skull breaking apart
And yet an original author is a rare tainted thing

So unique it conjures other worlds into being
While the chorus of the said and done heaves plaster

The old certainty enters and exits unaltered
Not yet aware of it's own over ripeness
Until the reader mistakes their nausea
For familiar intellectual residue

Fire on her muscle

 The woman crosses the hallway

Quarter moon peeking in from corner window

Hushed emotion wants out, the night cool echoed

caught inside iron of the room

She looks across the metal figures

Their bodies holding in last warmth

and night's remaining water

The tides of over exertion

The flame spreads over her body

only to be extinguished by sweat

Her body steadies

Her eyes avoid the flirt

Narrowing like closing gates

Passing between human sculptures

the half moon growing

Burning along their shoulders

The young woman raises her appeal

And her hand in a wave

daring to greet the outsider

and touches the cold metal

Her reflection breaks apart

across a dozen eyes that cut like lazers

speeding across human lines and human flesh

The hall fills with silver shapes

Arms reaching toward effort

Legs buried beneath braces

faces turned toward stars

The flame catches on her thigh

Crosses the full moon

between towers of welded steel

The young woman walks deeper

following tides of her inner intuition

Sparking arbitrarily inside human sculptures

Morning enters the hall

the metal begins to dry

Emptiness and a salty aroma

The young woman stands among them

But they are now part of the equipment

she uses to stay in shape

Her muscle taut her perspiration warm and saline

A cage for a baby bird

 A cage for a baby bird

The shopping trolley was left in a ditch behind the supermarket entrance after closing. The slow dirty water filtering itself through. A local council worker found it full of debris blocking a large outlet drain.  He threw it onto the dump truck, almost injuring his back.
By next morning the truck full of random objects taken from streets and parks.

The truck pulled into the landfill road changing gear diesel fumes up. And an exhausting vibrational sigh pushed out. The trolley rocked around in the back like a restless teenager. All sinew no fat.

The scrap pile ahead seemed the size of a city, rusted signs, damaged baskets and old refrigerators. The truck pulled into the area of the municipal landfill where they kept metal too mixed and damaged to recycle.
However trolley fell through the opening and landed on the a spilled pile from the landfill, beside mattresses and a mannequin head.

A bulldozer came down the slope pushing the cart further up the pile of regular trash.
The cart with its metal grades was turned upside down. It resembled a cage with something resembling a wig inside. As the bulldozer looked closer he realized it was a nest.
A small neck emerged from the nest. It was a baby vulture.
The driver cursed and made a mental note of it as he reversed to finish his morning's work.

By evening the landfill road was closed. The trolley remained above the old putrid layers, alongside the broken appliances, the spoiled food and the things people discarded in their attempt to fill their houses with newer material.

Unpacking the food

 I drove home with the packets beside me
corners tucked in and cold with cold
Hot with hot
hard with hard and soft with soft

The bread pressed against the rice
Milk sweating into the plastic bag

Get everything through the front door out of breath
Each thing into its assigned place
The tins stood waiting behind the cupboard
The vegetables anticipating beneath their own skins

Sat down before eating
Television illuminates the room
Another family smiled beside a labelled product
Children running through a manufactured garden

Opened the bread and took one slice
Chewed while the advertisement continued
empty carbs and empty sales ads
a mind full of coupons and discounts

Grocery shopping the middle age face shudder

 I came to the entrance of the supermarket
Notice boards full of posters of a family
Lost written in the middle in bold
I'd buy my food and call it therapy
I walked back out realizing I had no cart
Loud speaker breaking the cool quiet of the day
Blurting out a family is looking for their father

The shopping cart resembled a cage
Up the in ramp with a clatter
a man with bulldog cheek features was leaving
Came dangerously close

His dull eyes just said he was too tired to live
The vibrations of the full laden cart over the bitumen
hitting his face sneding tiny shockwaves
Through that lethargic anhedonia

I pushed past and back into that bright light
accumulating packs and tins and wraps
Of the brands narrowing and opeing eyes
Monitored by the central system

One asks themselves how long have I got?
when will I be culled off some plastic sleeved sofa
Slightly overweight and slobbering
Still attempting to convince the world
With slogans from my typical period

I pushed back out of the supermarket
My face vibrating like an astronaut moonward
Alas just the same as the last middle aged man
tiny nylon wheels jittering
Clanging when I fit it back into the train of them
Whoop crack as I open back door to put the food in
A simple consumer, living the hollow motions
between useful shifts

  

Sugar and lettuce

 Only sugar makes noise
Lettuce doesn't scram
Sugar is a song and dance
lettuce don't play

Sugar is kick and crack
Lettuce is shaking and wet
Sugar is hollering uncontrolled
Lettuce is all crisp and clean

Sugar sticks to rot and decadence
Lettuce to the seasons
Sugar uses itself and its consumer
Lettuce is the fresh root

sugar the old flower

Dana and the mannequin

 Dana and the mannequin she loved

Clerk girl Dana from a local dress shop decided to spend her sunday morning looking for a specific mannequin she had grown fond of beneath a pile of trash in the middle of the landfill.

She had come to love the mannequin for it was her favorite from the shop.
Everyday for years she had brushed up beside the mannequin. Looked at it, pretended it was a real person. Told all of her secrets to it. Interacted with it as if it was real.
Certain things had attracted her to that particular mannequin and not the others. The shape of the lips and the head and body, but especially the lips.

The owner of style classics dress shop had thrown it out the day before.This upset Dana deeply. The owner hadn’t bothered consulting Dana, but more so because the owner put no value on the inanimate mannequin. How could teh owner not see the beauty?

It had frustrated Dana, but Dana saw herself as a hero, riding out in her 1992 model hatchback whose motor was a noise pollution violation to the landfill. She had told herself after she had retaken the mannequin, she would pretend it had never happened. Because deep down Dana abhorred landfills. And the thought of her mannequin touching the rancid waste bothered her further.

Dana had spotted the area where the new trash was going in. And she had backed her little hatchback up to the pile. She climbed over a television, stepped around a broken chair and pulled at the mattress until it rolled down the slope. She spotted a head of another mannequin that had been discarded from her shop. That was it. The mannequin must be nearby.

The mannequin's hand appeared first.
She stopped.
The white plastic arm was buried beneath clothes, newspapers and a broken display cabinet.
A plastic back with black liquid inside that by the smell could only be rotten meat.

She crouched and began dry reaching for several minutes.
In an effort to contain herself she hopped back over the obstacles to her car and pulled a small flask of perfume from her purse. Spreading a few drops under her nose and cutting off her olfactory senses altogether.
Back into the mess she went, pulling everything away. A leg came loose. Then the waist. Finally she dragged the whole mannequin from the grimey heap and laid her against the side of the grimy mattress. She felt the smile start to take on her face as if it were a foreign impulse.

Mud covered the dress, the owner had neglectfully thrown out with the mannequin.

The clerk girl went back to the car again, took a bottle of water from her bag and poured it over the plastic face. Dirt ran from the painted eyes. Dana grinned, everything was intact, the face the way she liked it. The way she needed it to be. The way she imagined it in her bedroom at her house.

She lifted the mannequin under the arms and carried her toward the hatchback.
Did her best to fit it inside the trunk, having to adjust the back seat down.
The head and painted eyes looking back directly at her.
As if to say thank you.