On Recycling Days

If we could recycle days,

I think some would be too exhausted

To revive.

Like pallets of silver, unmixable things like

Sunshine and gym time,

Song writing and tool fixing.

You’d have to split

The metals from the plastics,

The feel of waterfall skin from the

Niagara on the screen.

You’d have to sharpen the scissors,

And carefully cut out the hot chocolates

By a fire, harmonies, Christmas trees.

Store them up.

Maybe wash away the ugly parts,

Fumbling kisses, drunken lunges,

Trips, cringes, urine breaks.

You’d be rich if you could recycle the rich days.

Poor if you were poor at recycling.

I think I’d peel out the blue sky mornings,

And switch a pregnant sky for a painter’s

Sunset �" I’d store them up �"

I’d overuse my recycling tokens,

My pink bags would be full

Of sandy toes and Scottish accents,

And Belgian beers and warm rain.

Green bags like confidence,

Swimming in the sea. Winning.

A bag of wind, recycled.

Falling asleep before your head touches the pillow.

If we could recycle days,

We still could not quite recapture �"

The exhausted ones like an alloy,

Crushed in mêlée,

Hard work and beauty entwined,

Tangled,

Irretrievable.

Reviews

[Cameron Simo]

Poems are always so interesting for me to read, as their messages are wrapped in such beautiful detail that you can easily get lost in them. This one is no exception and I believe that it can hit home to almost any reader.

From what I can tell, the persona seems to having some regret and wishes to recycle these bad days to make better ones. To achieve this, they take good moments from those days and reuse them for the not-so-good days to make them all good ones. However, this optimism seems to fade as the poem goes on, the persona realizing that recycling days just isn't possible and even if it was, would it be worth it to do so?

That is the message I'm getting. The message of while we wish we could change the bad days into something better, those days help shape us just as much, if not more, than the good ones. All of these was wonderfully captured in elegant word choice and a flowing narrative. For this, I applaud you. This is very well done. I can only hope to have such finesse in the novel I'm currently working on as you have in your poetry!