in the midst of this valley of the sun/near the airport where i once worked/is an archeological dig/of a platform-mound community that we call the hohokam/but of course have no clue as to what they called themselves

and about a thousand miles away/and on the other side of the mississippi from what is now saint louis missouri/another people from another long ago built mounds

both peoples started broke/but luckily mounds are dirt cheap/when you add elbow grease

we now everywhere are mound builders/but our mounds are undesirable stuff called “garbage”/and our mounds are called “landfills”

twenty years ago i met a guy in the waste removal business/who when asked what he did for a living/replied with a joking “business is picking up”

alas his business was not only picking up/but also dropping off/and he said recycling really didn’t amount to a hill of beans as far as the environment is concerned/but it made people feel better

our throwaways include effluent of various toxicities/and traces of them end up in our bloodstream and fat cells and skeletons

an uncountable number of micromounds in every living creature on our planet/including you and me

so here’s to you o mound-builder reader/bystander innocent or otherwise

and here’s unsolicited advice from a fellow mound-builder: take out the trash

by which I mean

despoilers of our earthly home