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Whose City Slide Show

All Things Owned Are Slaves

All Things being owned and those who own are slaves   Things of nature living Things of mind or fancy THINGS in being owned are slaves -- you say -- my child husband wife -- you say my body & your body being owned No longer you who own but yours a slave as all things being owned are slaves All Things bought and sold imprison what is free in mine & yours & mine-not-yours Imprison as your boss imprisoned is by you as you by him and the great corporate slave of slaves & holder of slaves As all workers owned by wages owned in turn in buying selling making slaves of all the earth & all that's on the earth & in it Slaves his & hers & ours & my & theirs & Mine-Not-Yours When all things All things of nature living (& all things of nature live) & Things of mind & fancy Yes & none can own what lives Its hidden truth Its Being true are hidden being slaves For all things common are for all in need to nurture life & nurturing & all good works Not getting but begetting Begetting loves children & for making Making needed things Engendering All works of art and poetry To cling to more than what is needed -- HOLD to Things by words of ownership -- my & his & hers & yours & theirs & mine-not-yours is Theft & all who own are thieves & the laws upholding owning These are laws of theft & those who uphold them All officers and magistrates judges holders of public office are thieves & holders of slaves & the hidden powers of Things living (all Things of nature live) also Things of Fancy & of Mind their hidden life in slavery brews in secret poison that transforms their owners Drives them to greater & greater acts of theft & to acts of violence Brewing darker secrets darker powers in violence born in darkness & to die in darkness until all life in nature (& all in nature lives) driven By the hidden power of slaves For things living will not rest easy in a state of slavery but corrupts all owning & all owners to their destruction even to the destruction of all Things singing better in our graves than slaves for every Song & every Poem is a Song of Freedom & Destruction & every Poem is a Poem of Freedom & Destruction freedom from owning & being owned -- no my no mine no his no hers no theirs But only Ours in Common in the great Love that encompasses all Things to the end & to the very end of the poem that owns no end & none can own

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Interview with Dorthea Lasky on Bookslut

HERE

The Violence of Ownership

Ran across this on wood s lot - scroll down, the piece via Jim Johnson on Rebecca Solnit's article in The Nation on Reconstructing the Story of the Storm: Hurricane Katrina at Five. An interesting compliment to my prose poem meditation on ownership

I remember the national guard after the Ruskin Tornado--how they made those of us who had been struck by this feel like aliens... name tags around our necks -- in the name of protecting 'property' ... that which had been destroyed and lay strewn about us in an 80 mile long field of ruins.

Those in power, on the other hand, often run amok. They did in San Francisco in 1906, when an obsessive fear that private property would be misappropriated led to the mayor's shoot-to-kill proclamation; a massive military and national guard on the streets; and the death of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of civilians. Much like New Orleans ninety-nine years later, those who claimed to be protecting society were themselves the ones who were terrorizing and shooting. Earlier this year, Haitians were subjected to a similar rampage of what the disaster sociologists Lee Clarke and Caron Chess call "elite panic." For example, 15-year-old Fabienne Cherisma was shot to death in late January in Port-au-Prince for taking some small paintings from a shop in ruins, one of many casualties of the institutional obsession with protecting property instead of rescuing the trapped, the suffering and the needy.

Surviving the new era, in which climate change is already causing more, and more intense, disasters, means being prepared—with the truth. The truth is that in a disaster, ordinary people behave well overall; your chances of surviving a major disaster depend in part on the health and strength of your society going into it. Even so, countless individuals under corrupt governments, in New Orleans, in Mexico City, in Port-au-Prince, often rise to the occasion with deeply altruistic, creative and brave responses. These are the norm. The savagery of elite panic is the exception, but one that costs lives.(....)


A disaster unfolds a little like a revolution. No one is in charge, and anything is possible. The efforts of elites, often portrayed as rescue or protection, are often geared more toward preserving the status quo or seizing power. Sometimes they win; sometimes they don't.

Beware those who assert power in the name of preventing chaos (the Chinese and Russian thug elite come immediately to mind).