A Poem for a Sunday Occupational Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club (10.16.2011)

1
It’s time. DIMENSIONAL TIME.
It’s time to remember the original occupants of Wall Street,
before there was Wall Street,
people—we can see now they people—
whose language existed without Command,
as Agamben is thinking, and then the machine,
the one emptying Cerro Rico of its body,
stealing the fat, of that holy mountain,
piling the guts next to it, and the poison
trickling down into the water, in which people
bathe, water they drink. Cerro Rico is not far
then, from West Virginia, where mountains are shorn
of their pinnacles, and the remains shoved into the valleys
of the most fertile and diverse ecosystem on the continent,
choking the streams, with poison.
It’s time that is a form of mental illness. The time of the clock.
This mean time, the time of Geneva. Neutral time. Effective time. Productive time.
Time is Money, Benjamin Franklin thought.
John Law was the one who got that money train rolling,
for the French, which shouldn’t surprise us, remembering the Kings,
and the guillotines. Revolution. It’s time, and we need a kill program
for time, with the clock ticking, like a terrorist bomb, a dirty one,
detonating our imaginations. Taylor was not an artist. Muybridge
was Eakins’s collaborator. The factory was the application. Humans
are the factory’s widgets, and Jaron is right to refuse to be a gadget.
We’re thinking too small by wanting a decent hourly wage. There is no
living wage on the clock. No time-based debt that is humane. Not if by human
one means free. Badiou mapped infinity and finitude, using math symbols—
Kittler’s Greek vocalic alphabet. We’re all Greeks, now, and we
must remember Solon, and the abolishment of debts, and debt slaves.
Democracy was the child of Solon’s emancipation of Athens.
That time is connected to time, now. In real life, it is the same time.
It is our perception that is progressing, dimensionally, which is why
the Oligarchs have brought war and theft on us, globally, and the Earth
is showing signs of impatience, which is wrong to say, anyway,
because the planet is not a person, actually. We are the people.
The demos, and we are not better managed as a business. It is plain to see.
The proof is all round us. That meme is a lie. One of many.

2
‘the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a
redress of grievances.’” the homo indomitus, again, and then again. Which is why the 1%
is so afraid. Terrorized. They look at these people, and they see
savages, unwashed masses, people who make waste naturally,
in public, in their commons, or paint their faces, give voice
to strange language, wear alien garb, go barefoot, in the city.
Sing all night, write poems, make love, laugh, cry, cheer,
even as the cops stare them down, tapping clubs on their breeches,
paid for by Jamie Dimon. Bloomberg, the plutocrat, the mayor,
the brand, dot com, dot org, dot gov, sorting through options,
managing his risks, doing cost-benefit analyses, checkin’
which way the wind blows, his American Dream, his legacy,
a tragedy, but this is not democracy. & the Indian he
got it wrong. It is not a demon-ocracy. Although,
Hannah, I can’t say I can’t see how it seems that
way, with that parasite, the so-called free market,
a lie. The invisible, red-handed, greed mechanism,
dividing the indivisible U.S., 1% against us.

3
“While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages, and wrote
poems with all our might.”
In three months. No one paying a bank a dime.
The whole scheme collapsed. Water. Water is
the vehicle for dreaming. Next we occupy Davos.
Then Salzburg. Then TED. An agrarian justice.