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You may devote yourself
To the machinations of our animal nature,
To insecurity and copulation,
Fight or flight,
To the games we make of a pecking order
Measuring yourself against your fellow.
You may grovel
At the foot of your betters
Like a hungry dog
Slurp at the dish of scraps laid out for you,
Nudge others out of the way,
Position yourself so you can fill your girth
Get your share, more than your share.
There's enough they say
Enough for everyone,
And you laugh every time
You hear that word
Enough, because there's no F in enough,
It's never really enough.
There are tough questions you never ask yourself
About the forces that make us do
What we do, say what we say,
Unanswerable questions still worth asking,
Like without empathy
What are you good for?
3 comments:
One of my favorite books from the 70s comes to mind: E.F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful". The subtitle is: "Economics as if People Mattered". His contention was that, by the 1970s, the Western World had mistakenly believed that the "problem of production" had been solved. That everyone, in other words, had "enough" (as in, enough to eat, etc.) That's his jumping off point. It's a book about economics, very readable, and Schumacher has his own very prescient prescriptions for how to move forward into the future ... I recommend the book if you haven't read it.
Schumacher aside, your poem touches on the lynchpin of capitalism ... that it's never enough, that we always want more, more than the next guy, more than we had before. It never ends. I am also guessing that there's a double meaning to "enough" in the poem ... that perhaps the poet has had enough of the dog-eat-dog world, as in "enough already"! This is definitely a "punch in the kishka" poem. Notwithstanding this, there's a few lines I have difficulty puzzling out, like "there's no F in enough" (I mean, it's true that this is a spelling quirk, but what significance are you assigning to it?). And I'm not sure about the ending. Are you saying that you are only good for something when you're in the "rat race"? ... or that "the rat race" makes you feel like you're good for nothing? ... or both? ... or neither?
I don’t know the Schumacher book. Sounds interesting. I will look for it. Yeah, there is the two meanings of enough, as you say. That was on my mind. And the lines near the end about the word not sounding as it’s spelled, is supposed to suggest that things do not function as they seem at first glance. There’s always some sort of hidden operation, a mind game we play with ourselves not tell ourselves certain things, declare certain things (read: ideologies, credos, mottos) while ignoring other obvious realities, like the suffering of our fellow. No F in enough, we imagine it’s there, sound it out, just like we imagine that enough exists for everyone, but in reality it doesn’t, it’s a myth.
Alright, I get it now.
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