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Cleanup On Aisle Seven!

I'd like to preface this blog by saying the following original poem is written in a style completely out of my comfort zone, so through my eyes as a poet, it appears a bit of a mess. But hey, "dissonance is a kind of sense" I guess. 


Cleanup on aisle seven

Where the neatly stacked pyramid of oranges has fallen

Where people pass by

Without giving a fly

Spurting juice under their fashionably protected feet


Now there’s a traffic jam on aisle seven

Where someone bumps into a shelf of wine

And when people point fingers at each others’ faults

All that’s left to say is 

It isn’t mine 


So someone travels to aisle four

And rips open a pack of paper towels to clean the floor 

But the liquid has migrated far beyond control 

Where now are also 

Soggy unraveled rolls 


Finally the janitor comes over

But he slips and his head lowers 

Now there’s blood everywhere 

But who should care 

To clean the aisles

When the janitor is also the owner 


I initially wrote this poem to depict the individual mind, where versions of onself repeatedly ignore one minor problem after another, in turn creating many more significant issues down the road. The janitor slipping on the aisles is a representation of one's present self—drowning in the downfall they curated for themselves. "The janitor is also the owner" highlights the key understanding that one is ultimately the prisoner of their own mind; no one else can come save them. You must save yourself. 

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I was just curious to how someone else would interpret this poem, so I asked ChatGPT. Surprisingly, it saw societal neglect as the heart of the poem. "Fasionably protected feet" symbolizes the upper classes who comfortably walk around major societal faults, whilst the janitor is a portrayal of those who suffer the most, and are disregarded. 

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I can't deny, reading this analysis made me really disappointed at first. I thought I somehow wrote the poem wrong, not even poorly, just incorrectly. After staring into the abyss between every letter, I came to realize how ridiculous my thought-process was. Rosal sums this up perfectly: "American art...is an ode to asymmetry". What I love about asymmetry is that it allows the space for every individual the same piece of work in an entirely different light. There is no wrong. It's just all a mess. "It's all material for the making" and that's what makes poetry so beautiful to me; it's organized chaos. 

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