"On the Inevitable Implosion of Our Funny Economy," A Weird Catastrophe Poem
In the coming weeks I will be publishing, in serialized form, an essay about, well, a lot of things, but the title of it is, On Dessa and the Novartis Brand of Biomedical Engineering.
With it, I combined many topics in narrative form, but with the main subjects being the talented rapper and writer known as Dessa (check out her work, she’s revelatory), and the pharmaceutical company Novartis and its cure for leukemia. (Yeah, a cure. Crazy stuff.)
It took a long time to research and write the piece and I‘m excited to finally share it.
But in the mean time, here’s a poem that first appeared in the Fortnightly Fixer-Upper:
On the Inevitable Implosion of Our Funny Economy
names get logged and secrets die,
the money runs out eventually,
the money that brought forth a new world, a new power,
something to exert our will over the many people’s below us,
but it came back to haunt us,
that very same principle of force and degradation
turned quietly but inexorably around,
once the destiny had been manifested,
the orient had been juiced dry,
the burden had been held aloft,
and our insatiable monsters ate our own children.
tell me the stories from before you knew me,
from before your shattered escape into the crowning country,
before all the stories I’ve heard before,
before the future was eviscerated and left in the sun
to play with the lives of daughters in a faraway war
who couldn’t be crushed or carted off or drawn on paper,
but who could be loved and vaporized in an instant
you were no place
in sight and mind, the streets were forever lonely,
I know there’s somewhere that you’ll always be,
I know you’ll remember,
we’ve both been there before,
in the pool and behind the café and after the crowd let out it meant everything,
the rocks and the police and the dark music couldn’t beat that power you had,
so just tell me that you’ll be there again,
I must see you,
but,
you were no place.
there’s people out there
tearing themselves apart from each other,
screaming,
flayed skin on the carpet,
hot red wounds bursting for the teeming crowd,
the horde of billions
waiting in line to take replacement,
driving the lives of two people asunder
so that everyone gets a taste of everyone,
the people are free and they’re out there
and they all want everything
all the time
it doesn’t stop,
the world runs mad with desire and it’s heaven,
truly, at last on earth,
I’ve seen it,
we don’t need to wait for the coming of the lord,
we’ve found it now, here, whether you’re ready or not
and it was a cold room
where they took it away from us,
where I laid on the couch and begged
the space-heater for mercy,
this fatal germ
it felt like a drug,
a plaything,
something to kill the time
but instead
became the time,
became her fists across my face,
became my feet turning away from her fresh sheets,
became a fat, wild-eyed woman,
became a skinny child,
became a vortex,
a pit of hair and sweat and
shame masquerading as freewill.
I look up and I no longer ask why
the flags are always at half-mast,
we either forgot to raise them back up
or we can’t be bothered
because they’ll just go right down again tomorrow
for the people
who had quite a bad day
and very few good days left.
the insects
living under the rocks
are laughing
at us.
the birds in the air, every seagull and crow,
hawk, owl, eagle,
and even the penguins and emus
are cracking up.
the bum on the street corner,
the WWII veteran sitting in his wheelchair in the living room,
they’re slapping their knees with delight,
for they all know that we’ve put our chips down
on the wrong hand,
the wrong table,
in the wrong house
miles away from the winning city.
looking at a door,
analyzing a chair,
staring at a roll of toilet paper,
noticing the stray hair
about to fall from that person’s head
is sublime
next to the unflattering beams of light
shooting from your hands,
arresting you from seeing the pain
hearing the laughter
feeling the things soon gone
bearing witness to the movements that turn worlds
and bear all manners of children,
I laugh along with these creatures
not out of discomfort or solidarity,
but because
a fat body
grown thin and tired has passed through each one of us
and we know that if we do not bite into its flesh now
and inhale through its punctured lung
then there will soon be
nothing
left
but
marrow-less
bones to
gnaw on
into
bored
eternity
and we bite into the
sweet and dripping
past
from before the dreams
of stardom and restitution,
before these places of the world
were fenced off high
from the likes
of us
and we gathered in the park, multitudes of us,
young and old, from every point around the country and around the world,
all of us shouting at the mighty thieves,
bellows ripping through the streets
towards the ones who believed in their greed
and thought us to be quite foolish and misguided,
we were disorganized but we knew who was responsible for our suffering,
each of us not believing in the future,
only in the irrefutable present
it wasn’t until they saw the whites of our eyes,
the scuffs on our boots,
the dirt under our fingernails,
coming for their throats,
that they understood our power,
that they laid themselves before us, weeping, begging to join up,
realizing that all of their heretofore unchallenged control
of the law, the state, the police,
the money, the capital, the leaders,
the land, the ocean, the sky,
even the universe itself,
was utterly useless when they squeezed the last drop
from those who propped up their very existence in the first place.
“we knew it was wrong,” one of them said to me, “but no one was stopping us. if only someone had made us stop, it wouldn’t have gotten this far.”
too late.
there’s somewhere that you’ll always be,
it was your freckled face that I saw then,
you lying in bed with the covers framing your head,
as our multitudes were tearing through their sickening halls of power,
I must see you again,
now that we’ve done something,
now that there are glimmers and flashes
and strikes of light on the edges of the world again,
truly out there,
but,
you were no place.