The poem begins inside a messy, dissolving mind, using the image of chocolate melting off cereal into milk. It's a childish, everyday picture, but the next lines turn strange: cereal floating through an "acid barrel," as if breakfast and industrial waste have blurred together. From there the poem moves into a chain of short, clipped phrases about energy, waste and garbage trucks "in recession."
The final lines make the point plain. We sell our dirt to the highest bidder, supposedly to keep our own streets clean, only for it to be dumped in rivers somewhere far away. The speaker seems quietly accusing, aiming at hypocrisy rather than shouting about it. The title's "self-righteous gnome" suggests a small, smug figure, perhaps a stand-in for people who feel good about tidy surroundings while ignoring the cost elsewhere.
The mood is dry, uneasy and darkly sarcastic. The fragments feel like items on a conveyor belt, and the flat tone makes the idea of passing our mess onto others sound disturbingly normal.