on the disposal of the possessions of a relatively unknown and recently deceased man (unfinished riff)

strangely like the clattering of 1950s newlyweds
they go clanking down the garbage chute
this and that, each a thing of significance
even if only, and the plastics I imagine undisposed
straight out to sea fragmenting, denaturing, atomizing
into a haze of green mutant depth under a sky
so brilliant, so thick that fish walk upon air
choking--this then the man-killer, the fish-killer
the fifteen fathoms of evil water column
your monument and eulogy
stranger, stranger old man, possessor of these items
which now clatter into a skip somewhere below
in our dark dreams we see you whirling
in some anti-recycle, into the trash vortex
into the undifferentiated trash tissue which no one
will ever excavate and treasure in any far future
for you are not Mycenean pottery with its hydra
swirls and fixation of the sea--you are just a bunch
of unknown plastics and crockery clanging only
the funereal clatter of your own falling into
some industrial embrace, and your spirit
each tiny fish-swallowed fragment of pvc
some particle of spirit and where perhaps
we will end up, now toxic, bringing down
great birds on dead islands, choking in black sand
surrounded by unreconstructable vestiges
of someone's shopping one long-ago day
in fucking Halifax, of all places. Goodbye,
honoured at this moment, unknown man
down the chute. goodbye, man who once
must have been huge and vital and beloved
goodbye

.