Now I have bin and you’ve gone
and forgotten my name.
All our bins still get a spin:
the ride still revolves,
the flashing compressing hollow
beast that comes through weekly
and though I offer comradely gestures
and ‘hey ups!’ you can’t process me
as a punter outside the scurrying trail,
the trawling circuit that has sustained you
since way before I joined you
as frontline bin cabin crew.
You were in the midst of the marathon then
but you had been binning since the beginning
with a quiet sense of focus like an endurance athlete
to an ever elusive end and still going..
back then it was the black art of the black bags.
We’d do a street at a time, an A team of four of us,
pulling off a new pristine, airless bags as gifts
to housewives from our belts as we opened gates
to get to the arse of the household-the bin
and pull out full bags, inflated and stuffed
like stools; we made piles of them on street sides
for one of us to scoop up and throw on-
the glory days of the backyard bin chase,
and well before they reinvented the bin
by adding wheels and recycling and
highlighting you with higher vis clothing.
low vis in you
I am lost in your tinnitus,
the bin din from all that lid
banging marching forward focusing,
to stick with it;
the muck-the man-the machine.