Thursday, July 19, 2012

Valhalla


Where grocery carts go to die, a wiry pyre of
discarded baskets set in an oxidizing disarray. Their gray
enamel skins scratched and bodies distorted
 from daily battles with shoppers who left them 
to drift aimlessly across the parking lot, 
perhaps colliding with a Camry
or a an old pick-up truck.

Inside the store, in front of shoppers' eyes,
they'd previously been aligned in pornographic
daisy chains. Nested deeply inside each other, only to be
torn apart by rough human hands, they'd roll through the store
to be filled up with the meager menu of a retiree
on a fixed income; the corpulent excesses of white bread, 
potato chips, macaroni and cheese, Ding-Dongs;
or the makings of an alcoholic stupor.


Even here, one can find gawkers 
straggling about the edges of the death scene,
while back at the store, a lonely cart has
been tipped against the wall, knocked off his
wheels at the loss of so many of his friends,
discarded at the first appearance of a flattened 
wheel or wiggly caster. With a patch of rust along his flank, 
how long will it be before he's similarly "downsized" 
to the pyre of obsolescence?

  

1 comment:

dive said...

What an unexpected delight, Speedway: a nature documentary on the lives of shopping trolleys (or grocery carts in your strange language).
Wonderful stuff.
I must confess to looking at the first photo and thinking "Oooh! Art supplies for free." A pair of wirecutters and you've got yourself almost limitless sculptural possibilities.
… and a bunch of wonky wheels.