You’re Now Here or Nowhere

Too near and too far,
You live in a jar,
A bottled-up world.

Everybody’s curled
And cramped as a djinn,
And everyone’s been

Around and around,
But, outside the round
Prison, only night’s

Untouchable lights.
Once, you braved your fears
And journeyed for years

To visit strange lands.
Now, on the one hand,
Almost anywhere

Can be reached by air
In a day or two,
Anywhere you choose,

But on the other,
There’s nothing further
Past the nursery

Of this orrery
You’ll ever traverse
Of the universe.

Sprig

One mu a tree
Two lin a grove
Three sun a wood
Ten thousand sun
A mu one tree

Eat the Poor

America does. Battens
On them. Has a long time.
They may seem non-nutritive,

Not much money on their bones,
But those are just the discards,
Homeless middens, byproducts,

Slag heaps left by extraction.
You don’t start out with the poor.
Target seams of marginal

Worth and make them productive.
Find people willing to work
For less than what they are worth,

Step one. Step two, sell them dreams
And necessities worth less
Than what you can charge for the them.

Company stores are classic
Money pumps but primitive,
Too local to extract much.

No, offer credit. Banking
Fees. Excessive rents. Fast food.
Dollar stores. The whole shebang.

As the marginal grow more
Marginal and desperate,
Your utility curves rise,

Carving profit from both sides,
Their labor, your services.
This can go on quite a while.

People will prove resilient,
Work harder, scrape to get by.
Only a minority

Go completely upside down,
No income, no production,
No payments, living outside.

Those you can ignore. Carve up
Into the healthier meat
Of the lower middle class

And keep the cycle going.
It’s stabler than you might think,
And surprisingly filling.