Mia Hart-Allison

No Accounting for Waste

The landfill site gapes capaciously,

indecent exposure defiling the hillside,

containing the same utter nullity as death,

like the noose around a suicide’s neck.

Everything here is deemed to be

as useless as a nun’s fecundity.

The cruel, complex stench summons distant insects

to gorge themselves giddy on society’s leavings.

Here, where nothing’s too good to throw away,

the shifting dunes of refuse mount up like excuses.

The on-site incinerator’s smoke, a furtive nocturnal emission,

the noxious fumes released only at night when darkness

is kind to such secrets, but can’t prevent the fouling

of the unsuspecting clouds, that quickly grow soiled

and stale as creased sheets the morning after.

From the chimney’s rigid middle digit

the pollution taints the rain that fosters

the site’s consumptive decay. When

the rare sun stings glints from ragged metal shards,

fool’s gold gleams deceitfully, seething meaninglessness.

This place of negation is pernicious as

a bloated, monstrous foetus, growing out of control.

Indelible as perfection, it has the tenacity of cancer,

expansive enough to block a worm-hole’s throat –

harsh proof that there’s no accounting for waste.

And though dogged nature never refrains,

the blighted life that results from death’s abundance

is saturated with latent rage and pain.

Even recycling’s lie multiplies the flies;

and, among dirty sepia debris acid-

green weeds flicker like an antique film reel.

This mass grave for remains of the living, a tomb

for the consumed, final resting place of the used,

Lying along the horizon: the corpse of a murdered giant –

both a vista of the perpetual past

and a preview of Armageddon’s aftermath.

Mia Hart-Allison © 2009