Problems from Quit by Other Families

Work starts off at ten o’clock with me and two women
named Brenda and I started off here in autumn,
the sweat of my Septembers here three years since.
I couldn’t count the hours. Days spent flicking coins
into a register with spurts of precision or piling donations in a stratigraphic profile of trash bags. Much is un-returnable and also like time waged in earth, words come in these piles, it must be this which was written there or rose up like something subconscious in a customer’s mention of the weather here at Talize, the vortex
at the sentence end of a period.

We work in two sections, the one
I’m not in called Production. They sort donations,
sifting the artefacts of other families, separating the junk,
crap, sellable from the celebrated stuff we get out of here
and into a dumpster. They work at the back,
and the break-room is close to that, as if my minutes away moved, direct with intention, nearing that backdoor’s new year, come here and sit for fifteen minutes with me, facing the wall,

as I consider everything I’ve rejected.

• Against Me!
• Canadian
• Cover
• Electronic
• Experimental
• Fusion
• Other Families
• Problems
• Punk
• Quit
• experimental electronic
• spoken word poetry
• Toronto