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Poems for Another World |
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by marc batko
Email: mbatko (nospam) lycos.com (verified) |
08 Mar 2005
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The world, nature, women and the impoverished South cry for an alternative where workers are more than cost factors, where all persons share in the social wealth and profit is no longer worshipped. |
THE TOTAL MARKET
by marc batko
The total market
pretends to be absolute and without alternative,
a natural law like gravity and the seasons,
an invisible hand for production and distribution,
a self-healing panacea
aiding those with better starting conditions,
where crises, catastrophes and wars
are repressed and off-budget.
As violence is not only military
but also economic and structural,
totalitarianism is not only explicit
but implicit, soft and invisible
where the land of unlimited possibilities
becomes a steamroller and
qualitative growth in a polyphonic world
is repressed by quantitative growth.
As humility and interconnectedness strengthen,
false consciousness prevails
where self-criticism and prophetic criticism
are dismissed as the ranting of dreamers,
where signs of estrangement,
the cries of violated nature and
ethical standards are decried as irrelevant
amid the dominant myths of productivity.
Language and community are threatened
where teaching is denatured to marketing,
where the meaning of work and
humanization of work are trivialized,
where future generations are forgotten.
where the poor are made invisible,
immigrants are stylized as threats,
and the homeless are criminalized.
The unsustainable present threatens
the open dynamic future
where only the powerful define development,
where growth is undifferentiated and
potatoes rank lower than arms exports
destabilizing the world,
defacing the meaning of productivity
and demoralizing actors and victims.
The system has already failed
where growth, competition and productivity
are everything.
where politics is reduced
to protecting investments,
where the media set
entertainment above information and
where hope and truth are annoying to the total market.
HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
By marc batko
Historical consciousness and utopias
do not become discredited
when little Bart
comes home all muddy and twisted.
Prejudice and inertia are steppingstones to understanding.
The ego must die for the self to be born.
Myopia, parochialism, homophobia, ethnocentrism
are only bitter fruits of self-righteousness,
the grand delusion born of anthropomorphism.
when one only has a hammer,
everything appears as a nail,
nature, women and the third world.
America, corrupted by wealth
where full employment only occurs through wars,
is the pioneer of speculation and misfortune.
Capitalism and the last superpower
are above the law.
where our footprint is too great
and wasteful use of energy is challenged.
we use the Creole trick
describing ourselves as victims
or divert attention with non sequitors
to avoid humility and self-criticism:
Do you want to live in Rumania?
Only repression artists could manage this
where nonstop consumerism
and limitless nature,
myths of a culture of excess,
are stylized as economic laws.
People on the fifth floor
often only talk with and congratulate
others on the fifth floor.
The powerful never make mistakes;
everything is only a learning experience.
The dominant immunize themselves
so bankruptcies are natural events.
Right-wing propaganda threatens!
Idolizing the nation or the belt-buckle,
scapegoating the weak.
the immigrants who make hardly any demands
on our social security systems,
make buffoons of triumphant America,
the “indispensable nation”
whose prosperity
when not the result of credit and GDP distortions
is based on weapons exports,
bottom-top redistribution
and exploitation of the global south.
Can we create an anti-authoritarian Plan B,
where life is a gift, not a possession,
where children and nature have rights,
where persons are processes and not things,
corn used up or ladders for others.
where we mend our own pockets and
treat our own hemorrhages,
where our gifts and visions are encouraged
not steamrolled in the quest for higher profits?
The future is not extrapolated from the present
but anticipated and protect ed in the present
unless we become buffoons of the megamachine! |
See also:
http://www.mbtranslations.com
http://www.foodfirst.org
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