Anyone who has ever stuffed something out of sight and then lain awake aware of it will recognise the situation in "The Pea", a poem published under the name Ancient Artifact. The speaker has gathered up the evidence of some past period ("every picture and note and smashed bottle cap"), sealed it in a box, and pushed it beneath the bed. The plan was never to look at it again. The poem is about why that plan fails. Hiding something is not the same as getting rid of it, and the speaker's response to this discovery is to repeat the mistake on a larger scale.
The title is the key to the central image. "The Pea" almost certainly nods to Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of the princess who cannot sleep because of a single pea beneath a tall stack of mattresses. That is an inference, but the poem's own detail supports it: "i can feel it through my mattress." In the fairy tale, the sensitivity is a sign of royal refinement. Here it is plain misery. The speaker is no princess being tested, only someone whose own buried history will not let them rest. The bed matters too. It is where a person is meant to be most at ease, and the poem makes it the place where avoidance stops working.
The construction is loose and unpolished, and that suits the voice. There is no rhyme, no regular metre, no punctuation and no capital letters, not even for "i". The poem sounds like a thought spoken aloud rather than a composed statement. The first stanza stacks its objects with repeated "and": "picture and note and smashed bottle cap", then "shoes and blankets and laundry". Each "and" is another layer laid over the box, so the sentence itself does the burying. The hard consonants of "smashed bottle cap" also sound broken, while the soft "shoes and blankets and laundry" sounds like padding.
The most interesting word choice comes at the end of that stanza: the feeling is "trying to seep back in my soul." The box is solid, but what escapes it is liquid. "Seep" suggests damp spreading through a wall, something no lid can contain. "Back" implies these feelings once lived inside the speaker and were evicted, not destroyed. The s sounds that cluster across the poem ("seep", "soul", "so", "some", "shove", "sheets") add a faint hiss, as though the feeling were leaking out in the sound itself.
The second stanza turns on the word "so", and the logic is ironic. The box is not working, therefore the speaker will add more to the pile. The tone is casual and defiant: "i think i'll shove some more crap under there." The verbs and nouns are rough ("shove", "crap"), a show of not caring that the first stanza has already undermined. The new items are mundane, and one is a little alarming. "A rotting apple core" is organic, so unlike the bottle cap it will not stay inert. It will decay and, presumably, smell. The poem hints that the strategy of hiding makes things worse, because the pile now contains something that spoils. The "notebook or two" may be another small admission, since notebooks hold a person's own words and thoughts, though that is a reading, not something the poem states.
The ending is where form and meaning meet most sharply. The lines run on as "and more and more and moreandmoreandmore". The spaces between the words vanish, and the phrase speeds up and tangles. It reads like compulsion, or like panic dressed up as housekeeping. Nothing in the poem is resolved, and without a full stop it simply trails off, as if the shoving continues past the final line.
The poem is significant because it takes a large, abstract subject, the avoidance of painful memory, and makes it small, domestic and a little funny. It never names what happened or explains why the box exists, and that restraint lets any reader fill the gap with their own buried things. The humour of the offhand voice makes the pain more convincing, since the speaker is clearly working hard to sound unbothered. It also gives the old fairy-tale image a modern edge: the discomfort under the mattress was put there by the sleeper, and each attempt to hide it adds to the lump.