Does the musician
Ever retire
From the act of making music?
A lifetime of note spinning
Is surely not stilled
By the grid of superannuation?
Does the researcher
Stop researching
Leaving thought bubbles
Clear of keen questions
No longer hypothesizing human traits
Into believable explication?
Such creative acts
Do not require remuneration
They exist
Like the good deed
For surely, acts of kindness
Acts of imagination
Still escape
The web of commodification
That inexorably chokes
Our common sense and empathy.
“To be useful and to the living”:
Modern geld might wish to buy
Away such gifting
But its pulse runs deep
Its evolutionary splendour
Bound with prosperity and survival.
Care and the communal
Are not lazy micro acts
But macro buffers
Exploratory thoughts
Hard against the exclusionary rigidities
That profit lays down
Brick by brick
Near the thin walls
And shrinking space
That developers extol.
The actor acts
Cooperatively
In lieu of pay
Channeling our ghosts and pleasures
Celebrating with mirrors
Our ancient stories
Recreating
What challenges and defines
The stuff of being human:
Free will engenders suspension.
Such alchemy begets its own geld
Free and resplendent like the morning dawn.
Here is no charge
But the one electric charge
That signals the unbending life force:
Seek no harm and live!
Gar Jones - January 2016