Jerome Sala

To ‘Content’

you are like a word-picture-video flow
whose every element is special, but as part of a feed
(feeding whom?)
        also generic

a textual form of meat product:
like the old Aristotelian notion of ‘substance’
nothing in itself
but the something out of which all is made

like the Buddhist notion of emptiness
a zero
pregnant
with the psychedelic possibilities
of the 10,000 things
not to mention
the 84,000 forms of illumination
(but whose samsaric version
most often manifests
as a googol’s worth of banalities)

like Marx’s ‘value’
made labor
between a bricklayer
a dog walker
a shoeshine boy
and an atomic scientist
equivalent
if translated into proportionate measure
of time, effort and general difficulty
or ease
so you
like Marx’s dad
Hegel
turn quality
into quantity
helping to accomplish
in your case
not the discovery of the ‘Absolute’
but the absolutely
complete
commodification
of all
human
and
artificial
minds!

great spew
waterfall
that talks
blinks
sings
weeps
reaps
gain
from its own errors and ours
from our massive stupidity
and occasional brilliance

you dance with a life of your own
like coffee does
over the world market
doing our living for us
so we can dip into your
energizing stream
when exhausted
or check in with you
for a little daily enervation
when we are too hyped up to function
in the requisite depressed robotic
or positively positive-mental attitude fashion

then go back to work
or forced leisure
making voids
in the void
for angry
or ecstatic
voidoids
to fill the voids
of their oblong coffin
or birth channel
voids
and ours

with more content!

Jerome Sala’s work has appeared in The Nation, Pleiades, Brooklyn Rail, Ping Pong, Best American Poetry, and others. His latest book is Corporations Are People, Too! from NYQ Books.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.