A Poem Is A Sweatshop

I retreat to the sweatshop
that is the poem:
First I form an expression
a face of the wife and the children waiting back home
a face of sweat and filth and coal dust and missing teeth
so that what’s inside, the sound of the chains that do not break
will remain unheard by the foreman
will remain unknown to the world
beyond the torques and the steam and the assembly line
-which is uninterested anyways- to which I deny
being a slave, to which I declare this:
All that you consume ferociously, all your gadgets and toys,
all are my sweat within the poem
and they will all return to that primeval form when
I’m thirsty and I deem it time, be prepared.

I live in the sweatshop
that is the poem:
It all roars, the air itself rolls and creaks
It all moves, it all turns, churns oozes bursts
(Day shift at the sweatshop an onslaught,
Night shift at the sweatshop an onslaught, too;)
An orchestrated betrayal from within, the world betrays you:
it has stolen from you what is within
and what is even deeper within
it has stolen from you what is within
the Earth Mother’s womb for you, and it feasts
on everything that has ever been yours so that you will
live within the poem
die within the poem.

I die in the sweatshop
that is the poem.
They undress me in a capitalist sternness
for the poem needs the clothes back,
they rub the grease off my body with a cheap sponge
and a disinterest cheaper still
both of which stain more than they clean
and they throw me outside on the industrial waste piles
piles upon piles all burning within:
Fools, they never checked my pulse once they employed me
it stops only now, after being thrown off
there was so much more they could still drain from my veins within the sweatshop
that is the poem. But not anymore.

I’ve never felt
more dead.

And then I depart the sweatshop
that is the poem
in nothing but my own skin wrapped tight around the bones
and when the sickly skin rots and the bones go to the rabid dogs who die and rot soon, too,
what a fool the poem is:
for every single letter of it I laboured over
it gives another piece of me back to Mother Earth,
that lascivious bitch, she’ll make me all sorts of things:
plane trees, strawberries, mountains, a cold stream, China, a herd of elephants

I enter the sweatshop that is the poem
a blear-eyed slave claimed to be a worker
I exit the sweatshop that is the poem
the world itself.