I want to be surrounded by splendor, but beauty is capitalism. This is to say
purchase power is how I was taught to love things & now I am exiled
in a country where living is only spectacle & roses, never bread.
How do I feed a village when my only skill is personal acquisition, not
distribution? My god, how wrong I was to covet dresses over firearms,
poetry books over agriculture. Ross sends me sunchokes from his garden
& I squint my eyes at them, trying to imagine the texture of drawing
food from the earth—my hands in dirt turn into rope pulling Good & asking
for forgiveness. They are killing us & we are all just going to the office,
watching tv & ordering out. I thought we were supposed to be resisting.
The deaths will accumulate like the snow & we will all be forced to forfeit
our lives for the revolution. I’m tired of hearing how nuanced it all is. It’s not.
They say it has everything to do with money & power, but what they want
us to forget is that it is about how we love. We are fighting for the right to
 

spend a storm inside
making soup & sourdough
& no one gets shot—

You see no beauty in the parched parade,
The quivering, heat-glazed highways mile on mile,
The fields where beauty holds a debt unpaid,
The gray, drab barracks in monotonous, grim file.

You take no joy when dust wraiths dimly curl
Above the winding column crawling on far hills.
You see but short beyond the present whirl
Of circumstance, your little wrongs and petty ills.

But when it all has passed and you have lost
The swinging rhythmic cadence of the marching feet,
Then you will reck as paltry small the cost,
And memory will purge the bitter from the sweet.

You saw the world a golden age,
    A country wench a Queen,
What is dull, wonted, formal, stale
    Magnificent Has Been;
Against you, zany of world’s stage,
    The man of safety wins;
But heaven shall be your own tilt-yard,
    Its palaces your inns.