Ode to Refrigerator Boxes

You are much to dirty for Mikahil Baryshnikov's toes,

to beautiful be allowed in Carnegie Hall,

too poetic to be displayed at the Smithsonian.

You are the foundation of the B-boy stance—that wild style

paus-pop-flex-flavor crowds jeered for, that stance which defied

police batons and prison cells, Vietnam jungles and Contra cocaine,

same stance that shot erect from your surface and mimicked sky scrapers,

Still I Rise tattooed in the lining of your back,

the firs stage ever

to support the weight

of a man spinning on his head. Once

you lined the park surface,

crowds stirred below the backdrop of a Bronx sunset,

Adidas scuffed

broke

swung-spun-tucked. Kids

became mystics

to the thump

of break beats. Now

you wait to be collected. Lost

from the tremble of fat laces,

the squeeze of shoulder blades

in revolution

the scissors of legs steady swoop of ankles, lost

from the Steady Rock,

Cool Herc rotation of turntables—you wait.

Outside warehouses and in trash bins,

in alleys in New York City and Paris

behind appliance stores in Idaho, Belgium, Egypt, Japan, Kenya,

in a hundred different nations

in a thousand different cities

where B-boys and girls

reinvent your name

in phrases as infinite

as the ways in which the human body can create itself in motion,

turn itself inside-out-outside-in — you wait.

You wait for boys and girls

who starve to move like

litered newspapers drift, who ache to tumble

like trash cans, to bend like ricocheting bullets,

to land upon you like jets and leaves

to set themselves frozen like dry paint,

to sweat form hips and shoulders,

to find rhythm

from speakers

that rattle

like silver-wear drawers in busy kitchens.

You wait for them to collect you,

use you as you were meant

as a dinner table.

Ç Myrlin Hepworth, 2011