Two thousand books, an Internet hookup, running
water, antidepressants, heat and light, frozen
food, trash—I live on the edge, I live on
in unimaginable luxury, hyperextended
with debt, goods unwaranteed like a mass-
produced glass slipper on a cushion
of profit: wages unpaid to wretched others,
no restitution to Earth’s teeming shores.
For manufacturers, fittest in artifice, Nature
seems One of the undeserving poor.
Neither Madame Bovary nor Miss Bart—the white
antiheroines to my work—I do not loll odalisque,
draped in trappings of romance, an objet d’art—but—
my creation is carried on backs of unpaid others. Sin
is a shortfall in its original language;
it is a deal for which I owe the Devil
nothing. The back wages of my sin belong to
the suffering world so loved, I cannot redeem it.
Such are the arrangements, from those who have earned it
my payment trickles away through clever diversions.
Yet if I give up even this dubious privilege,
I forfeit any chance to change—surrender
my voice, my vote, buried live and suffocating
in the milling anthill maze of survival,
bill to bill, late fees and service charges,
cancellations, reinstatements, my energy drained in pursuit
of tardy reimbursements—hardly happiness.
So I borrow from the makers of tacky trinkets
in tropical sweatshops, to pay their employers
for the privilege of doing what I do best,
for the work I love, they lend me their profits
to pay back with interest,
to keep the wolf of boredom, mental
and spiritual death, from my doorstep. I drive
the beast across borders to hovel-thresholds
they have blinded me to.
Gautama, a prince, could walk away
and sit down, and get up wise: I am weighed down
by the soul that I owe, discredited, to those who lend to the others
on less generous terms. If they paid me outright,
they know, like Gautama I could afford to walk,
and sit, and lift the bushel off this light
and give it back: let it so shine.
What would Jesus do? Not as the hacks and corporations,
not even ones called “Christian,” to the least of these even his sheep,
his alpacas in the Andes, his savannah gazelles,
in whose name I ask, “Is the laborer worthy of
her hire?” I borrow bread from starving mouths
for work less than half I’m worth, less than the quarters
machines demand in place of communities, while
their owners and masters profit doubly from the others
and ourselves. Now I am aware, I am awake—
how shall I respond, s’il vous plait? No check is in
the mail; money represents nothing
real to my Nature, nor anyone’s just desserts.