Refraction.

Veal

Let us falsify our existence;
Let us pretend
That we are doing something profitable,
Always profitable.
Am I truly radical for thinking
That a man should not have to work
Just to live?
That this corporate existence
Drives a stake between each man
And his humanity,
Forcing them to part ways
Day after day,
Never satisfied until he is so far removed
From himself
That his identity – what he is,
And all he could be -
Becomes mere profitability.
His mind is farmed mercilessly,
Like calves for veal –
Those above us
Use us
For all that they can,
With no regard for what we are.
No complexity, no feeling,
No responsibility –
Profit stems from productivity,
Not creativity nor joy.
The man is the dairy cow
On her way to the slaughterhouse:
When the farmer
Has drained her dry:
They see no reason
To keep them around.
We tell our children that they lived
A good life;
That the termination will be too quick
To be painful,
That this
Is what they were bred for.
Perhaps this is why I falsify my presence,
Feigning that I am useful,
Always useful,
That I have something profitable
Still to give.
I wonder if this is why
Poetry is written in secret, in the dead
Of the night –
Humanity and creativity cling together,
As do the calves to the cows.
I must feign my value; pretend to hold
The only sort of worth that a corporation
Can see.
It seems I am a radical
For thinking that profit cannot begin to compare
To life and to nature, that it cannot
Justify the exploitation of man
Nor beast,
And certainly not of the ground
Beneath our feet.
It seems the corporation has forgotten
That it, too, stands on the Earth.
It will forsake me this poetry,
The cow her calf,
The man his humanity,
But when everything crumbles, they shall realise
That they
Are mortal; they require more than just profit
To survive too.