Recovery: A Poem

Recovery

The flattery bears
down on us, leveled like a weapon
in the shaking hands of frightened and starving
corporate titans groveling like great beasts before us, desperate
and drooling, to convince us that their teeth are brittle and useless and anyway not
smiling makes them cool, and meanwhile, we scrape along the earth as things keep getting worse
and the land is fractured and carcinogenic beneath us and the blood-money pools
and our children learn to practice fear with ugly disdain
for the suffering and our skins are covered
with boils and we have lost
everything.
Here they come
again, lifting their offerings: free
hair treatments, free manicures, free dessert
with each entrée, free kid’s toy, free tote bag with purchase,
cajoling and bargaining and growling and anyway they’ll do it with or without
our consent, and meanwhile we cannot see the stars anymore and we cannot swim in the oceans
and they tell us they do not need us, they will
eat the world and we have lost
already.
But they keep on
coming, begging and pleading
their arrogance and we can see them drooling,
salivating, starving, the bones of death pushing through them and anyway skeletal
is thin and thin is fit and fit is in, and meanwhile we are plucking our own old bones to make
music eerie in the twilight of our dwindling age and we have no more use
for wives or children or cattle or land, for we
have lost everything and still
we are dancing.
And we are dancing
because we can see it,
the last fear in their parasitic eyes,
that yes, we have lost everything after all,
and they hear us singing, fracking our hearts wide open
with the words, we have lost everything, everything, we have lost
the perfumed skin, the flattery, we have lost our desperation, and yes, lost the all-consuming
fear and need
of you.