Value

Imagine the time I've spent not doing. Not writing, supposing myself to be a good enough writer, sliding into metaphors on bare, uncalloused knees. Not reading, assuming I am smart enough and insight can be shaken from the tallest branches like coconuts. Safe indoors while the world is made of split lips. Sleepily boozed and content with rattling windowpanes in the worst part of the afternoon.

I am old enough and young enough to want to be absolutely free all of the time forever from everything that does not matter and makes me small, crippled or indentured. The idea of wages stirs the deep murder. This is what Marx says to me. He says that we are free to be always bound by our compassion. Capitalism is too small a word for what has happened, and Marxism too small a word for the project of regaining what has been lost. I must be free; my heart demands it. I cannot be free until there is not one unfree person alive. I do not know how else to say this. Everything is shame. Even the happiest moments are obscene in the shadow of our Wrongness, and the only human moments are those in which we stir the slop at the bottom of the emptied spiritual well.

They took time away. All of it. The time we do have is not owned but leased on terms that are not ours. They took the soul away, by putting a collar on it. There is a they. Whose fingers clutch the thing you made today?

I am done with the waking death of alcohol and pornography. I am adult in my desire to never have to work a job again. This is what you feel as well. They took away the adultness of that feeling (or they who were taught to teach such things). They taught you how to smirk at it.

I do not know how else to say this. I must be free all of the time forever from the people who think I am more valuable to them than I am to myself, and I hunger for unfreedom from the lives of others. Real freedom is the duty of kindness, the time to share moments, the means to explore what you are and what can be done. This is not possible when your time is owned by a fuck at a desk, and when plants in China would rather install anti-suicide nets under their factory windows than raise pay by a single increment. I do not know what else to feel but shame and disgust and anger. I do not know how to take the fuck in the too-big house seriously, or how not to want to take everything that he owns away from him. I do not know how to speak measuredly about the charlatan fuck in the white house who sold our virgin optimism to Goldman Sachs. I do not know how to identify with the fucks at the bar when they go woo and put their fingers in the air because they got permission to escape ownership for two days. I do not know how to wade happily through the blood and guts, or how not to want to bite the hands that feed me off at their smug wrists.

So for now I work towards a time when I will break my fists against the faces of those who presume to own my fists.