An ode to Gumhead

Several years ago, I saw Douglas Coupland’s "Gumhead" sculpture in Toronto. It was a large bust of his own head that is speckled with gum, publicly interactive for others to stick their chewing gum onto. I loved it for its levity and playfulness, and was inspired to write a “poem” after seeing it.

douglas coupland has a point

there’s nothing too wrong with hucking a gob of chewing gum to the ground

it becomes one with the pavement

you tell me that the pigeons, my beloved creature mascot of choice for our city, might get curious about these wads of gum and go pecking

inadvertently i’d be the death of them because gum apparently isn’t good for the most robust opportunists this world has ever seen!

or you say, if anything gum would get stuck to the soles of some soul’s feet

but rarely would either happen, we both know this, and anyway

i don’t mind the speckled sidewalk with its dirt pink polka dots

and if we had to get down to what’s really doing in these city’s streets, it for god’s sake isn't the casualties of a few pieces of chewed up gum squished to tar in the tarmac but rather those menaces and their cigarette butts!

ditching them in sewer grates, on manicured front lawns and even outside of the hospital entrance way of all things!

yeah that’s what this city could use less of, less cigarettes and more gum, more bubble gum