Wall Street, on the Soul

Fear and greed invade each seed
and spot of us – they’re ragingly
contagious: saving your own precious
life – a horror at your death – are
what they’re fundamentally about:
morally, perhaps, they’re imprecise
but physically they leave no doubt:
you crave to breathe and you would

seethe and plot and rout and spout
against whatever other creature
needed breath if it remotely meant
that you would have to go. Try to mop
the woe from dying brows and you’ll
soon know that no one really
likes it anyhow. Is there a way
to celebrate and follow source

without resorting to a course
of killing hope and making corpses
of collaterally living things? If
you were a certain kind of Buddhist
through and through would you
contrive to find a way to let the slew
of flora in your small and large
intestines brew and never die? Ah,

but when they flourished, and made
flora nations, went to war: the lot
of you would self-consume and fry.
There is no way to keep on keeping on,
my dear, that won’t rely on kicking
something into the abyss. It’s you or me
or it or them, my friend – whatever’s
left can throw a goodbye kiss.


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