The Crowded House

The city sleeps under the peeling plaster ceiling --
piles upon piles of shoebox tenements and Tupperware garages.
Dustbunnies, spiders, and stale cracker crumbs

populate these rising structures among the chasmous alleys and urban ravines.
Thumbnail ninja figurines get lost in the streets
carpeted in flinty pebbles trekked in by sneakers,
ornament hooks the same shade as the actual carpet,

and strands of unaccounted for hair.
Part of navigating the city is memorizing the streets
leading to the busy stops -- the remote basket, the
paper shredder -- and some of the avenues

arriving at a plastic shopping bag.
Ignoring undisturbed structures is another way of finding
recently placed destinations, or

what needs to be gotten at
in the swaying, jutted edges
of the mid-level containers.

Upper floors rend space to the seasonal crowd
of baskets and holiday DVDs.

Here the skyline changes on the long weeks between vacations
as a new penthouse, in the form of a pre-addressed bill,
renders its predecessor obsolete.

Progress constructs higher levels upon the sealed boxes
without re-zoning much more than a paper sack
only meant as temporary housing for thrift store bargains.
Construction climbs toward that final ceiling

as if that, too, were the flexing boundary of plastic and cardboard.