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?