Litter and Birdsong

All nature’s cycles vitally by purgings go around

But men’s;

Even a dog’s pooh wishes well the ocean beds

Pressed out of the earth we came, our litter likewise parades

In our own image

To straiten, strew, the streets uncouth-like, slatternly

Where fare bright spindliest flower-shows brightly-weeding walls

Also, here what we call

Vermin careering wild alive through life and joyous –

All’s goodness notwithstanding;

Bar man’s self-like reflections littering gutter kerbs

Serving up back to us our loose-tendentious days

That mock kind nature;

Old scratchcards scratched discarded forlorn hopes

Mires of the mind on streets – inverse of paved with gold –

Dick Whittington’s old scam

Under a flowered treetop’s bending leaves

Upsurging in its eminence, and despite of trash;

Stands aspiring ‘making a go of it’ as people say, its spread,

A subject of attrition suffering needless scathe

Revelled in day and night across polluted town

Incessant as its ever-restless mills

Of constant traffic; cars, lorries, idlers, squads

Of drunken vagrant lags; yet bearing all

And flowers too, trees boast

Sat sweetly singing singers- simple birds

Whose rounds and lullabies are seldom caught

On ears upgeared to melees, babels of combustion

Which seek to fake right order out of self-made mires –

Against their schemes of things – nor yet

Might inklings enter in that valiant estimation

To put to rights by countermand, recension,

Their contrary attune to psychic beaten paths

En route to penitentiaries prognosticated,

And signalled by unsightly blights of litter; feed galore

For sweepers, binmen; their everlasting spreads

Man scatters where he does not gather; that one talent

Cause for dismay and everywhere self-evident

In the towns the crowns of lownds ride Ferris wheels,

A merry-go-twerking feckless who lasciviously

Close come-ons drawing-on wall-eyed

Their outward visions tunnel-blind and photoshopped

Unnoted is what bird, what throstle, sings,

(All’s hers which brings it brightly to our ears)

Commuted, muted, dud, these hydrocarbon buccaneers

And queenly lobsters parsing fingernails

With hairbrush as an airbrush as the gear

To screenwipe off a consciousness the upper world

Outside oneself; – yet health, and corny colour –

Kept Yakulted and browned by walk–in beds; fulfil

With sickly bling, their silly heads, no contravention

Admit, complacent to the gills; enamour’s thrills

The normal serving, missing, missed

What beauty natural living things observe,

Replenishing sensation (properly so-called) which urban loss

Cursed, crossed, assassinated, sent to sea, whitewashed,

Preferring on a plate conveniences

And going round and round insouciances

Unknowing and unknown in nature’s nomenclature,

Browse there insurged spent litters, plastics, manufactures lately dead,

Survived by, superseded of, yet more

Dead plastics, manufactures lately fed

To counteract drear glooms; to facial pokey rooms

Until the darkness come again down-low and lowers –

Then – lay new floors – pursue the malls –

In ever-fluid course

For packs, and staunches,

On leaks of emptiness inroading basement woes

Where liturgy supplies its timor mortis; here’s the door

Is ever set ajar; and seeking to inhume

With a Harpy’s grin. Against men’s mortal glees

Fate slinks with corporeal coils

Happy to prowl and gather to her dusts

Whether from living rooms or other feathered nests

Of weary-whiled style lives

And yet there thrives despite, a lovely mirrored light;

Amain a natural world nurtures, projects, proclaims

Emblems of pledge and promise from a realty non-compeer

Renewal, re-establishment against ill-misreport

Of obdurate finalities, rock-solid blank brick-walls

Of squalid null, of bog-all else, beyond what’s brash, hard cash,

And crank engines of shuttle-bustle thrummings,

Technology, indubitable substantive definites

That what-you-see-you-get; and nothing more

Deplore! – Steeped in a well so deeply-dark dissembled

Stand turbulent naysayers revolving convolutions

On stumbling ways intuiting spoilt waters,

Unseen, although yet pure, most potable, abundant;

True drink beholden of a hope where holiday maintains

Large Delphic grace

This is a place where no word minds beget

Or any thought; nor cobbled, franked, or flawed

Is not supplied by a love performed in heaven

?You can also find this article at our steemit blog: ?https://steemit.com/poetry/@matthew.raymer/litter-and-birdsong