Once it was garbage, refuse, trash.
A jumble of foul-smelling detritus hauled to the curb
And removed by sinewy men
Contributing a harder day's work
Than anyone else in the city.

Our energy now removes its entropy.
Sorted and classified into coloured bins,
We add order to our rejected matter.

Specialized trucks arrive to collect
The date-synchronized bins
Emptying them into functionally compatible mechanisms.

Most desolate is the black box of paper and cardboard.
Brochures and flyers, old magazines and letters.
Annual reports and cereal boxes.
Once these were enameled with crafted sentences,
Painstakingly typed, edited and debated,
On the monitors of copywriters.

Now they are just millions of words printed on flattened fibre substrates,
Jumbled into the bruised and scarred black box,
Entering into the recycling stream.

The nouns and adjectives,
Prepositions and gerunds,
All jumble together.

Fragments of precisely-crafted sentences and paragraphs
Are gradually broken, shredded and pulped.
Incomplete thoughts, broken phrases
Like those of a rejected stranger
In an lonely, unknown country.
Then words without context.
Then just disparate letters
Are all that remain.
Their  M  ea  N inG
G  r a Du all y
is re mov
e d
.