Utilizing Junk Mail

I worked for a company long ago,
A company with a style guide.
The writers of the guide suggested
the disuse of the word utilize.
"It means 'put to profitable use,'
And unless one profits, use 'use' instead."

How does one profit?
How does one profit from a word?
One sense of profit is benefit,
Even a spiritual benefit or advantage.
If something saves us trouble,
Do we utilize it or merely use it,
If there be no money in it
But great advantage for all?

When I was young, gum had wrappers,
A light parchment paper coating inside a foil cover,
A sturdy combination for discarding the used gum.
And outside that inner foiled wrapper
was a colorful paper wrapper.
We could fold them in a certain way and make a chain
A colorful chain that zigzagged along
Maybe mixing paper wrappers:
Juicy Fruit yellow, Doublemint green,
other colors and flavors. Big Red red?
The others have passed from memory.
What gum had a blue wrapper?
There was one, I am certain.

But with time, the wrappers also have mainly passed.
The inner wrappers became paper with no foil.
Less expensive, no doubt,
But not as good to wrap gum after the flavor
Had sublimated through the tongue
Leaving a hard chew that had lost its sparkle.
The outer wrappers? White paper shells glued together.

But today? Oh, today the gum comes in pellets.
The sticks can still be bought
For a higher price,
But the pellets are in bulk
In a bottle of plastic
With no wrappers.
No wrappers at all.
Not inner. Not outer. Not even glued shells.
And yet, the price is right.
The old wrappers nestled the sticks of gum
Individually, sanitarily, warmly
Like children sharing a room
In their separate beds, bunk beds
Stacked together in coziness.
But all that packaging
All of that coziness
Costs money.

I've been saving junk mail,
Not the cheap newspaper quality,
But card stock junk mail.
Social Security benefit seminar flier?
Advertisement for a child learning and enrichment center?
Any of those that we have not asked to come to us.
Also, subscription cards from magazines
That flutter out to litter my floors
And make me bend to pick them up,
And used paper printed off for a purpose now passed.
I fold and tear them into squares
And rectangles a few inches long,
Perhaps not quite as wide.
The subscription card?
Four pieces, usually.
A full sheet of paper?
Twelve with the longer side in fourths.

I have a stack of these rectangles
Some from this, some from that.
They sit upon the foot
Of my computer's monitor,
Not too far from my bottles of gum.
And when the savor is lost,
When I start to retch at what the chaw has become,
I reach for one of these bits of junk mail,
Shreds of an old campaign,
And wrap the dregs of rubber,
Rolling to give many layers,
Sealing the ends by turning them down
And depositing the used gum
Within its shard of junk mail
Into a trash can
Where it will not stick,
Profitably protected,
Utilizing junk mail.

A bit of the old doggerel to change your day. Do you find yourself doing anything to make up for a lack we once did not lack?