Workers should be happy
Their factories are closing down!
Delighted to be free!
          The slaves are free!
Instead it’s viewed as tragedy —
“How survive, how support
          wife and kids,
How buy all the things
You can’t be happy without
          without a job?”

Talk about labor shortages!
What about poetry shortages?
Why not create six million new jobs
          to save the Poetry Industry?
Six million new poets to write epics on
Girls-boys-love-death-work-play-freedom-
          wilderness-eternity?
Shouldn’t there be more poets than factories?
Shouldn’t factoryworkers be able to support
          their families by writing poems?

Only one epiphany is needed to discover
Just how powerful poetry can really be:
The fact day and night exist because the Earth
          turns round itself
Is in itself a miracle
We should be struck speechless by
          eight hours a day,
Speechless, motionless, gaping
Breathless to the point
          of near heart attack.

Here, smoke this joint alone here
And consider the unfurling maple leaves
          moist and velvety as puppytongues.
Consider sixty thousand years before Christ
Neanderthal buried their dead
          with bouquets of flowers.
Rather than crying when factories close down,
          cheering when factories close down.
Rather than factories closing down,
          no factories existing in the first place.