Downright Disgusting or Pure Poetry

Every now and again, I toddle on down the lane with a long-handled grabber in one hand and a bin liner in the other, collecting the detritus that others have either dropped while out walking, thrown out of their cars while driving, or that has been dropped elsewhere and blown in the wind – Sorry, Bob Dylan, but that is definitely NOT the answer.

People who litter are themselves detritus. Trash. Rubbish. Garbage. Ugly. If you litter, do not pass Go; do not collect £200; go straight to jail and rot.

Last week, amongst the predictable sweet wrappers, cigarette packets and beer cans, I collected some very odd items indeed: one marble, one dice (or is it a die?), one windshield wiper, one bicycle inner tube, six floppy discs (remember them?), a carrier bag full of grass cuttings, a roll of chicken wire, three golf clubs (woods, don’t you know), one hair ribbon (pink with white spots), one can of WD40, and two hand wipes that hadn’t been used to wipe hands (I assume you didn’t want to know that).

Such eclecticism – I don’t care if this isn’t the correct word here; I like the sound of it – reminded me of a lesson at school, when I was about nine. Teacher had instructed us to bring one item from our kitchen to class. Other than the “kitchen”, there was no criteria. I brought a chocolate bar, on the grounds I could eat it if I got hungry. Once a glutton, always a glutton. But when we were told to pool everything in the centre of the big table, I wolfed down my chocolate for fear of someone else nicking it, and all I contributed in the end was a torn wrapper to everyone else’s napkins, cutlery, pans, tinned peas, a doll with one eye, and a mouse wheel. Hmmm.

Anyway, what we had to do was write a story using as many of the items as we could squeeze in. I wrote about a mouse who went mad running frantically on its wheel trying to get to the chocolate bar before it was eaten by the doll with one eye. Creepy or what! Can’t remember what I did with the cutlery. And me being me and wanting to be different, I didn’t write a story – I wrote a poem. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I do remember rhyming wheel with feel, and peas with sneeze – yes the mouse sneezed. Thinking about it, I probably ditched the cutlery because I couldn’t think of anything to rhyme with it.

Could I write a poem about the crap I collected along the lane last week? Well I’ve had a Pimms, a glass of wine and a G&T so it’s now or never:

Sweet wrapper round the roses
A fag packet full of poses
A marble, a beer can
Nature’s beaten down.
Sing a song of chicken wire
A pocket full of dice
Four-and-twenty grass blades
Stuffed in a bag.
When the bag was opened
The grass began to pong
Wasn’t that a fetid thing
To leave beside the lane.
One, two, three, four, six
Here’s a pack of floppy discs.
Six, seven, eight, nine, ten
Tie them in a pink ribbon.
Baa, baa, black sheep, seen the golf clubs?
Yes Sir, yes Sir, three broken woods.
One with the wiper, one with the tube,
And one by the ash tree next to the lube.
Foxy Fox, Badger Badge, where have you been?
We’ve been to the vets for a jolly good clean.
While sniffing around all the places we feed
We came across stuff that we just didn’t need!

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