100% post-consumer — Summary

Dave BontaAnxious

make me a head that will let me see where I am out of books and hope

use a history of arson to turn me to ash

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The speaker is making a strange request: build me a new head, one that can show me where I am. Books and hope, the usual ways of finding your bearings, have run out. What's left is a kind of exhausted disorientation, and the plea sounds both practical and desperate.

The second stanza turns darker. The speaker asks for a "history of arson" to reduce them to ash. Fire here seems to mean destruction, but also a chance to start over. The title, "100% post-consumer," is a recycling label, and it suggests that what comes back will be made from used material, from what has already been taken in and thrown away. Judging by the title, the speaker may feel like waste, something consumed and left over, yet still capable of being reborn as something new.

The mood is bleak, dry and a little darkly funny. The poem is short and blunt, and it leaves the sense of someone who wants to be wiped out in order to see clearly.

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