{"id":2931,"date":"2026-10-18T11:39:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T11:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=2931"},"modified":"2026-10-21T09:38:53","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T09:38:53","slug":"shredded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=2931","title":{"rendered":"Shredded"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
My well-meaning partner 
tasks me 
with \"cleaning up\" 
my \"papers\" \u2014 
the ones in my home office.

As if it was a light task
that one could do
just 
like 
that.

He bought me this 
six-foot-long
wood-top standing desk
during the pandemmy
\u2014 when the four brick walls of our home
had begun to crush in on us \u2014
for the sole purpose 
of containing me
and my archeological strata
of papers, note pads, books.


And yet \u2014
as I enter my owl's nest, 
my study,
six years post-vaccine,
I reckon with wild strains of chaos
that my loose paper stacks breed 
unmitigated by anything Pfizer 
nor Moderna could invent and bottle.

My horizontal storage
has reached its zenith;
this free-range filing system
must be addressed with haste.
 
The wrecking ball is coming:
it will rip through 
my fifty-year-old window wall
and my vintage interior sheetrock

And this force of deconstruction
will arrive outside my window
in but a few weeks' time
with no discretion for thoughtful piles labeled:

\"Review for Relevancy\"; 
and \"Poems in Progress\";
and \"Bills - maybe?\"; 
and \"Notable homework pieces\"
(I will not further clarify between self and offspring)
and \"holiday cards - find address and mail\" 
(some from 2023, one from 2015);
and half-written thank-you cards, 
address scratched out once, twice, thrice, 
representing a much-traveled relative 
who has yet to receive my birthday gratitude;
and \"Medical records from 2000-20.\"

With little zest and much animus,
I sit myself in the center 
of the wee nursery-turned-office
and I dump every colored folder
it their contents
out onto the floor
in a pile of unexagerable enormity
keep the matches away
Farhenheit 451 
could consume us all 


<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cShredded,\u201d an experiential poem on reckoning with years of paper artifacts  rendered acutely obsolete by the coming of a home renovation, written Sunday, October 18, 2026 poem 291 in a series of 365 poems written by Diana Ludwick in 2026. Photo: “Memories a Mile High”  by Diana Ludwick \u00a9 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,811,262,2733,1573,311,200,1717,2734,1572,2,551],"tags":[3091,3094,2677,148,3098,3096,3101,3089,3090,3093,2838,739,3106,3103,2008,28,3099,896,3104,2747,3107,3102,3109,1616,3100,3097,3105,3108,3092,3095],"class_list":["post-2931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-poetry-challenge","category-current-events","category-dry-humor","category-ethnographical","category-generational-of-place","category-generational","category-humor","category-loosely-hinged-2","category-material-culture","category-of-place","category-poems","category-unserious","tag-archeological","tag-artifacts","tag-autumn","tag-books","tag-brick-walls","tag-cleaning","tag-cleaning-up","tag-desk","tag-detritus","tag-digs","tag-excavation","tag-fall","tag-farhenheit-451","tag-filing-system","tag-free-range","tag-history","tag-home-office","tag-home-renovation","tag-horizontal-storage","tag-material-culture","tag-medical-records","tag-note-pads","tag-noteable-homework-pieces","tag-october","tag-pandemmy","tag-partner-relations","tag-poems-in-progress","tag-review-for-relevancy","tag-strata","tag-winnowing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2931"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2940,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions\/2940"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}