Cauldrons
The Fan in Richmond, Virginia
I hold in my hand
The remains of long-dead giants
That the earth cradled in her loving embrace
For millennia
She mixed the story of their lives together
The joys they experienced
Their families
And the dangers
Are these notes still there
Encoded just beneath the surface?
A rich black soup they became together
Dark like eternity
Blacker than the night sky
No illustrious
Brilliant
Points of light to be had
Buried so far down
And then suddenly
In what was an instant in deep time
They were disturbed
The black blood siphoned back to the surface
To become entangled in a new story
One where a translucent siren
Stares back at me
Beckoning me to drink
From the dark well of destruction
A tart pineapple refresher
For $5.05
I think I should’ve added
Coconut milk
The stories
Woven together below the earth
Now hold the grossest pineapple tidbits
I can’t choke them down;
The texture,
It’s like shrimp
Whose horrible idea was this?
My mind ricochets between guilt
For not wanting to finish these
Floating
Squishy
Pineapple pieces
And more guilt for having thrown away this
Cup
In a city garbage can
It landed with a large
Thump
I go back to thoughts of eternity
And how this cup
Meant to be so temporary
To hold an overpriced, branded drink for barely an hour
Will now exist in a landfill
For hundreds of years
The pineapple refresher
Definitely wasn’t worth a hundred years
It wasn’t even worth
The $5.05
But I know its story isn’t over
It’s never over
Just as the dinosaurs could never have imagined themselves
Mixing together to hold a summertime drink
In the year branded 2022,
I can’t know
What’s next for the cup that was with me
Only for a few brief moments
Maybe it’ll eventually feed an ultra-sentient being
Who learned to use plastic as nutrition
Eons ago
And who serves as the world’s heart
Who makes soups out of root vegetables and herbs
And says prayers of blessings for all beings
As she herself consumes plastic
In an ecstatic orgy of light and color
Or maybe
The cup and all other plastic cups like it
Will congeal into a monstrous
Mega Cup
That will terrorize the world with bad drink recipes and waste
Brought together by the faded dreams
Of the Possessed West
Who can know?
The cup
Maybe
Maybe it already has all of its past and present and future wisdom
Contained within it
Maybe so do I
And I just can’t access it
Because I’m too busy to notice
The siren luring me to my self-assured destruction