Thesis 19 — Summary

Jim LeftwichCheerful

trash like a bus transfusion washes up in the visceral circles

commodities and their piglets walking on their hands

Learn Poems app

Try the Learn Poems app

Everything from the website trainer, and more: new exercises, voice recording and sharing, reminders, quick review.

Read quickly, this short poem is a jumble of images that don't quite add up, and that seems to be the point. The first line mashes together garbage, a bus transfer, and a blood transfusion, then sends the result washing up in "visceral circles," as if the city and the body had become one system carrying the same waste. Nothing is explained, so the reader has to feel the connection rather than decode it.

The second stanza is the most striking. Commodities, the goods we buy and sell, have "piglets," as though products breed more products, and they walk on their hands, upside down and slightly absurd. The speaker doesn't state an opinion, but the tone feels darkly playful, even mocking. Judging by the imagery, the poem sees consumer culture as messy, bodily, and a little grotesque. The mood is unsettled and wry, closer to a strange joke than a lecture.

Read also

More by Jim Leftwich

All poems
AnxiousJim Leftwich

Thesis 11

participants are blindfolded and one is denied the world within
AnxiousJim Leftwich

Not This

onto the door a row of roses guts Inupiaq gusts jarring rib-cage behind fire hardy rambles
DreamyJim Leftwich

Thesis 52

the voyage ka looks across the loan storm foam while miraculous as corn was found among our collective pianos