Amazon, Eat Yer Heart Out

BUY & CONSUME & SELL & EARN & O' is it not so exhausting to repeat this cycle near-endlessly, and without break? Just imagine how warehouse workers feel. But so long as we know work, and value is created, and labor is oppressed, something something, Karl Marx might not have been as wrong as ol' Papa told me.

I was a young communist of sorts, as many of my generation were and continue to be. I generally agree with the overarching points, but I must admit when a system is more efficient at creating stuff & things & items & products. REWRITE: I must admit when a system finds a positive feedback loop of Buyers and Sellers, Creditors and Debtors, of Havers and Have-Not-ers.

The phrase “eat your heart out” means to suffer, but specifically by pining for something unattainable. Marx certainly ate his own heart out – though, from what I hear, he never had so much to eat (were it not for his wife). But that bearded thinker with boils on his butt had something going on up there. He had an economic sense of the destiny of a-system-which-needs-not-be-named.

However, I am no economist. I don't even read The Economist. But surely poetry and prose does something more than circulate within itself? It thinks, it breathes, it lives, just as the rocks on the ground and the deities within them. (Crack a rock open one day; you might find one).

The oldest God of Economy was the colorful rock. Not gold, mind you, but rather: a cave with paintings on the wall. We knew value then, and the artists knew labor, and the audience knew to applaud. There were no Mothers or Fathers to say “NO!” to writings on the wall. But somewhere along the way, that currency came along. When ubiquitous value made its debut, there was, for better or for worse, no turning back.

How've you bee since then? I've been fine. Surely is easier to buy paper, and pens, and little trinkets on Amazon that I forget about while they're being shipped because they were never important in the first place. Yeah, no, things are not just fine. There is beauty in the world that is dying at the hands of our convenience.

“Oh god, a soapbox!” That's fine; stop reading. Or continue. I'm here to say some sort of piece – and it is that we lack peace. What has all of this consuming done? At best, it has annoyed us and our energies – perhaps a Freudian assault by the powers-that-be, in an attempt to keep us...predictable? “Oh god, a tin-foil hat!” That's fine; stop reading. Or continue. But at worst, we have made a casus belli against Mother Earth.

~

the heart is marinated in

hopes and dreams,

yet,

it is merely one fruit of this

human tree, this body.

(i've always preferred

rhizomes, metaphorically,

but more literally (and less accurately):

mushrooms.)

so far as we are trees

with heart-fruits,

we should understand

the duplicity

of signs of love.

jackals and giraffes come to mind.

giraffes, for their sizable heart,

and jackals – well,

they are a symbol of predation.

there was an old wise man

who told me

never to respond

to a jackal

that seeks your heart.

but let us leave that mystic language:

what is to be done

when a human reaches

for your left breast?

probably

to recoil is the safest response,

depending on the hand.

first, forgive yourself.

you are not wrong to waver in trust.

we have all been burned,

but do not be so

alone.

as we join hands,

lets us know love,

while also remembering

that there are those out there,

hand outstretched like

a loving offer

that are there to give,

but more likely,

to take.