Newspaper Wall

Newspaper wall, you are finished.
13 feet high and 10 feet wide, narrowing to 6 feet where the bridge juts out from you, seven feet off the ground.
I built you to the ceiling today, at last. Weeks and months of saturdays at the recycling center, hands in the dumpster:
"do you have any newspaper today, ma'am? can I take it for an art project I'm working on?"
hoping they think art students are cute and not spoiled.
I talk to the volunteers and farmers and old women.
"you again?!" they say. "you still need MORE"
they invite me to their house to take old furniture, bring me plastic bags.
I will give them postcards next week. They want to see what newspaper girl has made (one even calls me lady- strange).
Our aquiantence makes me feel good, maybe too good. My artwork is a small blip in this town. Not just for my peers, not just for my school.

And all for you, newspaper wall!
You are so heavy, so dense, so fragile.
As you've grown I've thrown my weight against you, to make sure you were strong.
Run my hands over you, gazed at you. My precarious partner, looming over me as I sit at my computer, make my flowcharts and drawings, talk with my friends.
You are a testament to my commitment, a singular jesture to show that I believe in labour, that I am willing to work.
Visitors say wow wow to the bags when they walk in, gaze or pass by my trash, and then stumble across you in the back room and say OH.
this work you are doing must be rather epic, if this pile, so huge it's stupid, is just another thing you do.

I was upstairs not more than two months ago when you fell. You were eight feet high, then. I screamed.
a cloud of your filth descended on everything, grey and thick.
You spared my computer by two feet.
You took a week to rebuild, and I was tempted to leave you there, you looked beautiful on the floor.

When the flood came I cried for fear of you. water seeping in to you, if you fell this time there would be no fixing.
You would be what you would be.

You will be terrible to dismantle, wall.
slow, heavy work, to bring you bit by bit back to the dumpster from which you came.
Like most of my work, you're just a diversion from the waste stream. I am powerless to stop this:
the newspaper existed already, and so will be returned to the earth someday in a less than ideal form.
A visitor weeks ago told me I MUST keep all these things out of the trash, perminently- which I think is delusional.
Everything is trash.
Maybe I will find another home for you- a house with a wood stove, a permaculture farm.
A less direct path back in to the post-industrial earth.

For seventeen more days of work and fourteen days of display, you will stay here.
I've done a good bit of banging around you, I think you are safe for visitors. I hope.
You are grown, now, and so it is time to rally the rest of the room around you.
Shelves to fill, piles to sort, letters to write, drawings to make, floors to sweep, railings to build, lights to hang.
Everyone will be finished in seventeen days.