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From: Vol.05 N.01 – Stick in a Thumb and Pull out a Plum: Poetry and Comsumption

A Paltry Reminder

by Dennis Garvey

A: Romancing down the Corner Store

 

Of all those petty signs without credit

And all those puny signs devoid of credit

Of poetry and usury – Open All Hours –

And of our fathers, founding nations by finding

Retirement, pensioned off to a gilt-edged

Security, I won’t stash the usual wad of lies

As such, or tell stories about counting out scratchies

Until a much bigger coup was in store, or remember

How Dulcie, to get even with the Keats’s rule of thumb

Complained about the cockroach – a Handy Food – swallowed

Whole and alive, only to receive an extra – sent upon the bill

‘La Cucaracha!’ ‘La Cucaracha!’ We came to conquer

Napoleon said that, and the Fat Lady shouldn’t wear denim (axiom)

And of our fathers, and of English breakfasts, washed down by some

Foreign store, I say, finders keepers to a nation of shopkeepers

Tit for tat in a game of this and that, in this age of the deep-freeze

Where not only the dollar stands to go soft, and the man on the corner

Who used keep pigeons in a loft, is now respectable, and clean-shaven

Enough to race customers, and buy and run his own LuckySeven

 

B. Of Death and History

 

Where are the YouTube videos to show these things

About ourselves we never see, for instance

Distance from the shop, the next door drapery

Or the time it takes to traverse this space from A to B

And how the World Food Store, if caught on the hop

Must be good, for at least one more long weekend

And then the 20teens, arranged to ease this pain

In lieu of Mogadon, resigned to sun and blue fading

In the rain, came the endless lines of Aldi chains

Where the workers lost, and the shopper stood

To gain confidence; or is this merely the difference

Between – she’s got a nerve, changing channels

On my dream – character and personality, exposed

Again on increasingly smaller machines

Where numb to misery and the crisis in store, no more

No more do we catch what the refrigerator hums

Switching off death and history.

I am wired for delicacy, but the online grocer brings

Only ecstasy, oh how I try not to admire the bourgeoisie

Especially at Xmas and Easter and all year round

Published: January 2018
Dennis Garvey

lives in regional Western Australia, has been published around the traps a bit, and has diverse interests including matters and topics ecological and environmental, which is why I’m happy to have found Plumwood Mountain, and it me.

An Australian and international
journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Plumwood Mountain Journal is created on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to elders past, present and future. We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the lands this journal reaches.

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