Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I do not read the Wall Street Journal. I do not track unemployment rates nor the affordability of houses. I simply look out my window and notice the signs that we are struggling as a society.

I know there is no easy solution to economic inequality. I do wish that we channeled greater energy into figuring out the wealth gap, how to provide sustainable wages to working people. One of the corrupting aspects of our economic system is that it forces us to accept conditions that reduce people and nature.

Today’s poem provocatively melds vocabularies to dramatize the degrading effects of economies that harm real human beings. The poem urges us to notice the complicity of language.

The Devouring Economy of Nature
by Daniel Borzutzky

The mark the skin the face the skin the bone
the skin the back the skin the reaping

the privatized face

the foreclosed back

the lake
was burning

the hedge fund
collapsing

too much liquid on the roof

too much debt in the face

too many bodies fleeing themselves

the bodies kept stepping out of their own 
genetic mutations

kept forming new bodies

and when we tried to verify
what the old bodies meant
to the new bodies

we came to understand that the reason for the boiling heart

was that the storm was trying to make its way
out of the tax shelter

 the raging hurricane was stuck
in the colony’s backwater

the earth could not absorb
the colonial heat
the colonial wave
the crypto pump-and-dump

the rust the char the madness

the corpse’s name carved into its skeleton

the photo they found in the corpse’s pocket

the face they found in its pocket
the corpse they found in the bank

it was slick with oil

it was stuck 
in the ceremony of bureaucracy 
in the testimony of one bank head
saying to another bank head
no the people should not have
what we have
the people
if they are lucky       should have
what other people
in their tax bracket have

perhaps they can
ascend a bit
perhaps they can     slide
from side to side

there are bears waiting
to mop up the remains of the pump-and-dump

there are compliance officers
waiting

for the commission to declare
insufficient coverage in 
the book the home the price the food the pipe the blood
the beating

the compliance officers filter the bodies
into a parallel superstructure
into a parallel pedagogy

the identity of the stuck body
floating or sinking

due diligence shows 
the face is a vacancy

a pink sheet 
a breath-note

a narrative of nature and nation
of what we might possess
when we      come to understand
how pain and time
are controlled     one by the other

the father said to his children

whose hands are these
and why have they 
left them on our doorstep

whose feet are these 
and why have they
placed them in our mailbox

I don’t understand 
what it is
they want from us

you see
we were living here
so quietly 
then suddenly
our house was in another nation

and this is not a metaphor
the compliance officer said

and your house is not your house
for you have surely seen
the title 
the deed 
the language they found
in your basement

nevertheless

I understand you might prefer
to wait
for the bomb to crush your roof
said the nice functionary
to the bodies he needed to evict
but there is not always time
for such a grand gesture
of destruction

little by little
the bodies were repossessed
restructured

they were reinvented
transplanted
to the border
between disappearance and the absence of time

“The Devouring Economy of Nature” by Daniel Borzutzky from THE MURMURING GRIEF OF THE AMERICAS © 2024 Daniel Borzutzky. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Coffee House Press.