Grocery shopping

 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.

Style classic fomo

 Morning revisits thus bodies lift sheets
Check their heads and orientations
Some straighten and tuck clothes underneath 
Some look through mirrors and hum

They walk toward the city center
Disatisfied with how they are dressed
Mentally adjusting to becoming spenders
To kill the monday to friday stress

Shop lights pop behind dummies
Clerk girl turns with movement finess
A delicate hand adjusts mannequin dress
Pedestrians move closer to the window

I watch fake candlelight weaken behind glass
As first sunbeams boldly make demands
Clerk girl touches mannequin's hand
Her gesture catches the attention of the queue

By afternoon the line reaches the corner
She sees the same faces through the glass
Some smile but she looks away fast
Some lower their eyes and wait

With the inner knowing
They'll never be served

The chef that resigned

 I walked toward the entrance
A chef with knives and fire
My stomach had begun to yearn
The waiter came outside laughing
Asking if he could take another plate

I asked him to use his own discernment
I head out back shocked at the mess
Past bins filled with bones and paper
A dog was waiting beside the kitchen door
Sniffing through yesterday's acidic scraps

I crossed back through parking lot
leaving the waiters and cooking staff
The smell followed under my shirt
I opened my car and turned the engine
Waiting for my senses to forget the foulness

Then that beautiful hunger returned on my drive home
Slowly taking the place of the day's errors and stenches

The dreamless creature

 If you rise again stale
There is something of you waiting
To be collected
Your hands remember the shape of dreams
Your legs remember running through them
But no memory of the dream remains

When you refuse the easy road
Conjuring the lucid dream through your effort
You enter another agreement with sleep
No promise of true rest
You dance in an open eye hot and organic
Searching for abstract place to exist 

You push until your mind objects REM regular downfall
You push until permission becomes the only outcome
Every breath becomes part of a subconscious bargain
Every movement asks for the images, the emotions
And finally an awakening to a new understanding

When you finally wake and no sense sits on the edge of the bed
There is no internal applause no resolution the way there used to be
Only your heart beating inside you and the coldness of morning
Knowing you went somewhere and forgetting
Simply a migrant with amnesia

Seeking your pillow when in fact...
Living entwined with the brutality of life
Proves too much

A port of no reply

 The port was somewhere ahead of them
Distance kept moving its position
The Hopeless looked back towards hills
Observing trees running rebelliously into rain

Water ran down their faces
Shoes filled with brackish
Someone laughed and nobody spoke
A gull followed, a floor board croaked

They passed houses with yellow wooden panels
Families eating comfortably behind curtains
Warmth was as foreign as they were
The hopeless and unwelcome

At port, ferry lights flinched and flashed offshore
Engines running somewhere in darkness above waves
They stood together without speaking to stay warm
Trying to remember where they were supposed to arrive