LACK

by Dion Farquhar

We shall squeeze you empty and then
we shall fill you with ourselves.
--George Orwell, 1984

formerly a radical pursuit: the point where spirit met nerve spine
efficiency eclipses old-time siloed seriality
now cybernetic robot teams dispatched
driven by tokens narrow bandwidth lines of cloak
like a door beyond which lies a spectrum
tiny sets of cues more powerful than a size D
or a hard dick noir anti-metaphysical gumshoe
chasing clues undercover
difference no deeper than the Dewey decimal
tracking the tiny donor in the painting digital signing
whipped up to a theatrical frenzy our artists of the real economists
remake the world (tacitly) celebrating the clean canvas
great floods and fires new tyrannies like absolutions
but the only fetters falling away over fifty years
are restraints on the market caps on corporate license loosened
Sukarno copper nickel rubber oil military coups
Santiago saw slogans painted on its walls in red:
Jakarta is coming
Washington Wall Street
shoveling shared wealth back into private hands
advancing on the crest of disasters
It’s never been a better time to be a robot a repo man
or a corporation
devolved to free market eradicating opposition
before it gets off the ground
imagining resistance still a source of the possible
embedded macros idealizing information
no wonder the attraction of virtual systems
nothing on TV but blowhards and pundits gutless demagogues
pledging sotto voce crying crocodile tears
while I’m logging on for something skeletal
to the right of jihad
that names the closed loop opposes the corporatist model
the poor disposable the rich free
to amass endless wealth the bottom line
increasing the revenue stream
ten times nothing makes ten


Dion Farquhar was born in 1947 and lives in Santa Cruz with the love of her life and their two teenage sons. Formed by the Sixties and repudiating nothing, she still misses New York, her old friends, and off-off Broadway theatre. Her poetry has recently appeared in City Works, Ikon, Fifteen Project, Second Hy(na)ku Anthology, Rogue Scholars, SLAB, Ep;phany, Otoliths, LanguageandCulture.net, AUGHT, Poems Niederngasse, and XCP: Street Notes. Her chapbook Cleaving won first prize at Poets Corner Press in 2007.
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