Three for Austerity

Peopleless I didn't want
Of anything but freedom ripped

From life after austerity policed
Full employment Whitman

Never predicated this synthesis
Yet for a different kind

Of totality do we spray
The will within population

Saying what won't be defended
Because natural rights aren't given

We risk losing the whole periphery
To be in this sea writing

*

Hedges grow like deficits
Inflation does more work breed
What you see but do not know
What you are doing and know too well
Concrete like money, like the air is heard

Abstract like a surface and
A surface just beneath
The visor called finance
Visualize a difference
These markets make on the skin
Visualize the end of the world
Then stop it since these
Distributions form a name

*

I know these waves don't shelter me
No shelter was their song
They gave to me American
A kind of islander in a divine

Wind, its exceptional breath
When we take our last whole worlds collapse
Whole markets collapse proletarianizing

What we touch, even ourselves,
Immune to this gift no longer.

--composed August, 2011