Don’t you think it would be smart if you got something to eat?
Is what I hear
in what I imagine to be the surgeon general’s voice
if Sister Ruth-Ann, who publicly scolded me
for not memorizing my multiplication tables
were the surgeon general
making a public service announcement
in my brain. In a dark, low-ceilinged bar
a pretty young woman’s skin is white as the parsnip
I chopped up for gumbo this morning. On her man’s
freckles, if you look as intently
as she is, you’ll find the lyrics from all the songs
on the best juke box in town. Neither of their eyes
are seasoned enough to pierce through the beauty
of life, to see its return-on-investment side,
which you can find at a table like mine
where for the price of a pint of beer
I’ll tell you that each of us is a business, that our bodies
are fences around industrial parks
and inside we’re manufacturing fans
that work fine for 38, or 39, or 42 years,
or forever, hard to tell from fan to fan, one
or two catch fire each year, and we conduct
studies, move goods, make decisions based on formulas
that factor in advertising expenses
and the cost of damage control, calculating
down to the cent the value of a human life,
the cost of a three-walled cubicle with no window view.
Those who purchase our goods are worth X
to be reached. The ones who will die from our faulty wiring
are worth Y in compensation. The last line of the story
problem of our life to date says that the value
of Y must always be less than X. We will sit here
drinking, it’s clear by now, till we’re drunk,
watching upstart lovers like we’ve caged them,
like they’re our parakeets, trying to convince ourselves
that the cage, like the box we never think inside of,
is outmoded thinking, that what we have here
are entrepreneurs who’ve stumbled onto something big;
this is our chance to be envied for buying stock
at the very beginning, and holding on.
| Matt Mauch |
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