The Purple Lake
All the way at the bottom of the Purple Lake
Sit a wheel, an orange peel, and a purple stake.
They’re resting on two stilts and a rake,
In the muck at the bottom of the Purple Lake.
In the muck at the bottom of this violet lagoon
You’d have the feeling of being on a foreign moon,
Walking on rocks and grape-colored goo,
Through seaweed and birdseed and half-dissolved shoes;
Pieces of plastic, elastic and gum,
CD cases, erasers, broken bottles of rum,
Springs from a violet mattress of a bed,
Dolls disconnected from their arms and their heads,
There are lots of little boxes with big letters on the sides,
Itsy bits of computers chips tossed around in the tide,
There’s an airplane wing, a curly thing, and thirty-three fireworks,
Bags of rags and shopping tags, half-buried in the murk,
Hidden are fifty pages of someone’s first book,
(The print now obscured by magenta soot,)
Containers of remainders of projects never done,
A boat propellor, the door of a cellar, a sculpture that weighs half a ton;
A fish could reside beneath the hide of the saddle that sits on the ground,
(If it could stand the radioactive sand and incessant buzzing sound)
While a snail could fail to see his own trail through the filth that festers all day
(If it could survive the potent high tides of monoxide and fermented whey).
The algae feasts on Barbie feet, on strands of synthetic hair,
As the water-skeeters gape at the Barbie-eaters, who are too busy eating to care.
Something slimy hangs around a rusted washing-machine,
and something spiky lies atop a bathtub turning green.
Beside graduation tassels, fish-tank castles and the half-gone habit of a nun,
Two aquatic cockroaches talk of the days they saw the sun.
“Remember when,” began the first, “When the lake was filled with fish?”
The second was drawing circles in dirt that covered an indigo dish.
“There was no such thing as privacy,” he said, puttering over a pile of tins,
“You couldn’t get a moment to yourself in the constant fluttering of fins.
But then the fish died and their bodies would rise and block out the light from the sun,
until the flesh rotted away and the bones, all grey, would sink down one by one...
“And the mermaids got ill but the hermit crabs still pinched the flesh that remained,
Until their wounds began to ooze and the life dripped out of their veins;
And the sucker fish had that hopeful wish that they’d be able to live on worms,
But the worms withered out and the slime all about got filled with toxic germs?
“And suddenly it’d become this lonely thing, being alive in the lake,
and we wondered how surviving had been written into our fate?
Why are we left here?” (and he shed a cockroach tear,) “in this godforsaken muck?
To be still alive in all of this, are we supposed to consider that luck?
“Sitting here in this garbage with the water insects and the mold
Subsisting on leftover litter, doing little but getting old-”
“Yes,” the other cockroach replied in a moderately musical tone,
“But as long as we’re here,” (and she sounded sincere) “we’re lucky we’re not here alone.”
(sticktogethercausewerestucktogetherwehavetoholdeachotherup)
Sit a wheel, an orange peel, and a purple stake.
They’re resting on two stilts and a rake,
In the muck at the bottom of the Purple Lake.
In the muck at the bottom of this violet lagoon
You’d have the feeling of being on a foreign moon,
Walking on rocks and grape-colored goo,
Through seaweed and birdseed and half-dissolved shoes;
Pieces of plastic, elastic and gum,
CD cases, erasers, broken bottles of rum,
Springs from a violet mattress of a bed,
Dolls disconnected from their arms and their heads,
There are lots of little boxes with big letters on the sides,
Itsy bits of computers chips tossed around in the tide,
There’s an airplane wing, a curly thing, and thirty-three fireworks,
Bags of rags and shopping tags, half-buried in the murk,
Hidden are fifty pages of someone’s first book,
(The print now obscured by magenta soot,)
Containers of remainders of projects never done,
A boat propellor, the door of a cellar, a sculpture that weighs half a ton;
A fish could reside beneath the hide of the saddle that sits on the ground,
(If it could stand the radioactive sand and incessant buzzing sound)
While a snail could fail to see his own trail through the filth that festers all day
(If it could survive the potent high tides of monoxide and fermented whey).
The algae feasts on Barbie feet, on strands of synthetic hair,
As the water-skeeters gape at the Barbie-eaters, who are too busy eating to care.
Something slimy hangs around a rusted washing-machine,
and something spiky lies atop a bathtub turning green.
Beside graduation tassels, fish-tank castles and the half-gone habit of a nun,
Two aquatic cockroaches talk of the days they saw the sun.
“Remember when,” began the first, “When the lake was filled with fish?”
The second was drawing circles in dirt that covered an indigo dish.
“There was no such thing as privacy,” he said, puttering over a pile of tins,
“You couldn’t get a moment to yourself in the constant fluttering of fins.
But then the fish died and their bodies would rise and block out the light from the sun,
until the flesh rotted away and the bones, all grey, would sink down one by one...
“And the mermaids got ill but the hermit crabs still pinched the flesh that remained,
Until their wounds began to ooze and the life dripped out of their veins;
And the sucker fish had that hopeful wish that they’d be able to live on worms,
But the worms withered out and the slime all about got filled with toxic germs?
“And suddenly it’d become this lonely thing, being alive in the lake,
and we wondered how surviving had been written into our fate?
Why are we left here?” (and he shed a cockroach tear,) “in this godforsaken muck?
To be still alive in all of this, are we supposed to consider that luck?
“Sitting here in this garbage with the water insects and the mold
Subsisting on leftover litter, doing little but getting old-”
“Yes,” the other cockroach replied in a moderately musical tone,
“But as long as we’re here,” (and she sounded sincere) “we’re lucky we’re not here alone.”
(sticktogethercausewerestucktogetherwehavetoholdeachotherup)