the things this dumpster mattress has seen,
heard, experienced…she’s got some stories, man
there was that marathon night of nine times—
she lost a little bounce after that…
she’s been moved all over the place,
from apartment to apartment,
squeezed through doorways,
dragged across pavement,
laid up sideways for hours in that sketchy truck
you borrowed from your cousin…
this dumpster mattress has been through it all—
the blood, the piss, the vomit,
the sweat and the spit,
the cum and the shit—
she’s nestled little cats and dogs
and kept the saddest of people cozy
on the coldest of days
and now, here she is, naked and dirty,
springs bustin’ out,
flopped over a crusty-ass garbage heap,
waiting to be picked up by god knows who,
headed to god knows where…
do you know where these mattresses go to die?
this thing that held you up, supported you,
gave you peace and rest
without asking for anything in return…
how will she be treated in her final hours?
how will she be honored for the beat-down life that she’s lived?
dumpster mattress, you should be given a memorial service —
a goddamn funeral and buried,
or burned to ash and kept in a pretty urn on a dresser
next to the young, cushy, memory foam bitch that replaced you…
this way your ghost can hover over her and laugh
as she gets trampled to pieces just like you did…
ah, what a joyous life we lead
Garbage Notes:
Feels like I’ve moved so damn much over the last fifteen years. You don’t even want to know how many addresses I’ve had since I moved out of my mom’s house to go to grad school back in my early twenties. And each time, without fail, I’ve had to drag my poor old mattress from one place to the next.
It was never pretty. And the mattress took a real beating. Dragging it through the street, up staircases, and down hallways. Propped up against walls, stuffed into moving trucks. It was always so sad…
It’s especially sad when you consider how intimate a thing a mattress really is. I mean, it holds you up every night. It’s the place you rest your head, your body, your ass, your whole being, really. There’s both a physical and a psychic energy, it seems, that gets transferred into that object, you know, the more time you spend with it. It absorbs so much of you—body fluids and skin cells aside—it absorbs the tiredness and the entire shock of your existence.
And one day, when you have the means—and when the poor old mattress just can’t keep on keeping on—you inevitably decide, well, the lady she has to go… And where does she go? Where else… on the side of the damn road, all naked and exposed to strangers. Maybe a homeless person takes it, maybe it gets scooped up and taken to a landfill. But we don’t look back, right? We never really think much about this very intimate personal object, and where its final resting place will be.
We move on and enjoy the next one, happily, comfortably.
So, yeah, this poem is for the dumpster mattress—for all the discarded things.
Love the insights—it's something I haven't thought about much. But I guess mattresses do have a tough life.
Truly, a laugh out loud piece here. Mattress given a memorial service...I almost lost it there :-)