A piano stands alert
Guarding the homeless and their tents.
Nearby squats a case of books.
Bread is available
Tea and warm drinks:
Like Peter Grimes and his hut
Here is order, here is sense.
They face the dark marble
Of the Central Bank
With its own strict orders:
Lanky mathematicians
Buoyed by econometrical diligence
Patter down its hallways
Shaping their model worlds.
They peer out across the mall
(Detached from the common weal)
At those battered by the strict play
Of the trickle-down chain
And its parchéd good:
Do these Pharisees reflect on their failure
To float the golden mean?
No, the homeless are but one enormous down-payment
For the arcane wealth that funnels upwards
Where the fulcrum is stacked with triggered weight.
Tax break by tax break
The inherited wealth expands
Buffed on these alchemic configurations:
Bereft humans (major) morphing into concentrated geld (minor).
The state
With cobbled laws
Moves the homeless on.
Inside their withered chambers
The politicians meld their way
Into the sheltered arms of that old praetorian guard:
Those sanctified bankers and their developers.
Like the old women without hearth or savings
The rest are foreclosed
By a fiscal apparatus that lectures forbearance
Mortgaging the next generation
To the crush of defeated expectations
That vice like extrudes the working poor
Into loss, as the other: undernourished and haggard.
Gorging on its property fees
Neoliberalism adjusts itself to a burgeoning underclass:
The price of free trade
The price of free labour
The price of guaranteed debt
For the elected few
In a sea of punitive disorder – mantra aux mantra:
Move the homeless on!
Move the renters out
Beyond the bounded nest.
Choke them on their toll roads!
Burden them with empty shops:
Let them expire in despair
Like worker bees stung into deep regret!
Lost, except for the thud of remembrance
That bloody clot (rabid pulse) that induces constant pain.
Disorder and disruption lurk in the wings
Distaste and disgust flowing in fiscal ways.
No equal balance, no equity:
Wellbeing is traded away
In the flap of those shabby tents.
Everything has a price, even rebellion:
At the Emperor’s banquet
The departed homeless linger in the air
They toss their scent and hard luck
Like talismans in ruins
Silver ghosts haunting the border lands opposite
Where arcane signals conflate the runes.
Vengeance lurks in those marbled hallways
Putridly ripening.
Orestes is not dead.
The neoliberal shibboleths
Are ultimately bred for death:
The sentinel homeless will smile
As the glinting axe descends.
Gar Jones: September 2017
Guarding the homeless and their tents.
Nearby squats a case of books.
Bread is available
Tea and warm drinks:
Like Peter Grimes and his hut
Here is order, here is sense.
They face the dark marble
Of the Central Bank
With its own strict orders:
Lanky mathematicians
Buoyed by econometrical diligence
Patter down its hallways
Shaping their model worlds.
They peer out across the mall
(Detached from the common weal)
At those battered by the strict play
Of the trickle-down chain
And its parchéd good:
Do these Pharisees reflect on their failure
To float the golden mean?
No, the homeless are but one enormous down-payment
For the arcane wealth that funnels upwards
Where the fulcrum is stacked with triggered weight.
Tax break by tax break
The inherited wealth expands
Buffed on these alchemic configurations:
Bereft humans (major) morphing into concentrated geld (minor).
The state
With cobbled laws
Moves the homeless on.
Inside their withered chambers
The politicians meld their way
Into the sheltered arms of that old praetorian guard:
Those sanctified bankers and their developers.
Like the old women without hearth or savings
The rest are foreclosed
By a fiscal apparatus that lectures forbearance
Mortgaging the next generation
To the crush of defeated expectations
That vice like extrudes the working poor
Into loss, as the other: undernourished and haggard.
Gorging on its property fees
Neoliberalism adjusts itself to a burgeoning underclass:
The price of free trade
The price of free labour
The price of guaranteed debt
For the elected few
In a sea of punitive disorder – mantra aux mantra:
Move the homeless on!
Move the renters out
Beyond the bounded nest.
Choke them on their toll roads!
Burden them with empty shops:
Let them expire in despair
Like worker bees stung into deep regret!
Lost, except for the thud of remembrance
That bloody clot (rabid pulse) that induces constant pain.
Disorder and disruption lurk in the wings
Distaste and disgust flowing in fiscal ways.
No equal balance, no equity:
Wellbeing is traded away
In the flap of those shabby tents.
Everything has a price, even rebellion:
At the Emperor’s banquet
The departed homeless linger in the air
They toss their scent and hard luck
Like talismans in ruins
Silver ghosts haunting the border lands opposite
Where arcane signals conflate the runes.
Vengeance lurks in those marbled hallways
Putridly ripening.
Orestes is not dead.
The neoliberal shibboleths
Are ultimately bred for death:
The sentinel homeless will smile
As the glinting axe descends.
Gar Jones: September 2017
