Ode on a Black Plastic Compost Bin – Caleb Parkin

Ode on a Black Plastic Compost Bin

………….after Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

O Mucky Dalek, sat cloistered in shady chrysanthemum corner, I lift your lid, your roof, your
scalp, its underside covered with the squiggled pink inklings of earthworms. Your very
mind is alive! Worms levitate above shrivelled deadheads, fur-green lemons, beetroot flashes,
in your breath. Your breath! You breathe: inhale our eggshells’ brittle edges, the bittered grit
of our coffee grounds, the potatoes’ luminous growths, the outer hides of butternut squashes
that our finnicky intestines cannot even attempt – but you breathe all of it in.

Your appetite is grandiloquent. Gingerly, with fingertips, I lift at your hatch, trapdoor
to your lower world, where ants reimagine our teabags as hillforts; where woodlice
hurry data between them, a stock exchange of putrefaction. Your great cylindrical
belly rumbles with remaking! The fruit-flies launch their fleets skyward, rocketed
with rotting nutrients. You have become a home for masses, a city which
mulches itself back into the ground like a delicious and urgent degrowth.

Our Stout Dinner Guest, on this garden’s silver platter, we promise you the endless
amuse-bouche of all which transcends the plates of the louche and lavish landfill of our lives.
We will avert our flimsy noses and submit to your writhing depths. At the allotted time,
Pungent Lodger, we will draw out the gift of your earthy laughter. We vow
to witness your pastoral song in municipal waste: Oh passionflower! Oh gladioli!
I proffer my long-held longing, this love to your ground: be giddy with butterflies!
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Hysterical with bees!

…

Caleb Parkin is a day-glo queero techno eco poet & facilitator, based in Bristol. His debut pamphlet, Wasted Rainbow, is published by tall-lighthouse in February 2021 (launching on Saturday 13th). His debut collection, This Fruiting Body, will be published by Nine Arches in October 2021. From 2020 – 22, he’s Bristol City Poet.

Tweet: @CalebParkin | Insta: @couldbethemoon | Website: www.couldbethemoon.co.uk