Eating Litter (a poem by al sweigart)

And now for something completely different... One of my hobbies is picking up trash. I never know if my code or my book writing is as good as it can be. Maybe there's some slight change that could make it run ten times faster or sell ten times as many copies. But an hour spent picking up trash is roughly as optimized as it can be, and there's always trash that needs to be picked up. It's meditative and it gets me outside while I catch up on podcasts. Anyway, here's a poem about eating garbage.

Eating Litter, by Al Sweigart

I love eating the trash
Bottles, wrappers, cigarette ash
Cups, straws, and the liquid inside
Glass if whole, but shattered shards I'll abide
Caps and gloves, when the weather is cold
And the taste of cardboard never gets old.

Floss picks from teeth to ground to my maw
A five gallon bucket of restaurant coleslaw!
A sole shoe with sole gum, used first aid bandaging
I chew so much chewing tobacco packaging!
Garbage parked at parks or lobbed from lobbies
I get shrieks of delight when folks see my hobby
I devour trash that is wet, trash that is stale
And all washed down with gig driver golden ale!

I eat and eat all this discarded treasure
And there's so much, much too much to measure
People don't seem to see the feast at their feet
Until they watch me dig in to the meal on the street
They gasp and applaud at how I consume it all
And I never worry about an end to this Garbage Ball!