A Literary Journal of Critical Thinking
In the Samizdat Tradition of Writing against the Machine
A Forum for Examining the Dark Side of the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex
 

Cathryn Shea (Sausalito CA)
I'm a corporate slave trying to figure out how to free myself again. I'm currently employed with Oracle as a technical writer; however, I'm out on disability for breast cancer. Ironically, I found my tumor after my retina detached itself, and while I was lying around in a fetal position, so it's been quite a year and the time off has provided me with hours for introspection. I got involved with the computer industry about 20 years ago although I've always been anti-corporate and deeply against capitalism and imperialism. At first, working in computer companies felt comfortable, but by the late 80s greed and profiteering took over. I have a B.A. in English Literature from California State University, Chico. As a student, I was a member of Students for a Democratic Society. I live near San Francisco with my husband, a public defender, and my daughter, a struggling worker and student.

Deadly Mutations Hit Your World

give me/ the every day/ struggles/ because they are my song,/ and that way we will walk together,/ shoulder to shoulder,/ all of humanity,/ my song unites them:/ the song of the invisible man/ who/ sings with humanity.  (Pablo Neruda, “The Invisible Man”)

#1
You spy the news through a peephole
Your trusted sources gather just for you.
You are an obsessive observer of sensational subjects
—which you don’t fully understand.
You get sharp bullet points, headings on a platter,
Boiled-down simple sayings—reduced, palatable,
Served in a steady stream to suit your interpretations,
Provide excuses for your lifestyle—
Which you cannot bear to give up. You won’t give up! Even
For the unborn children you carefully plan to bear.
To you the rhetoric is reasonable:
Ads and jingles hawking slick propaganda—you are glad.
To buy or not to buy is your only question. To buy is to be.
Of course: Buy!
You are the consumer of the Whole Wide World.
You make economies run.

#2
You say people who take the Fifth are dodgers—boozers, drug
Abusers, unless they’re privileged CEOs. People who exercise
Rights like free speech are traitors, right?
This is your right! And you are very right
To express yourself.
Please, relieve yourself of pissant irritations
Like poverty, illiteracy, and mental illness.
Moral convictions are inconvenient and feel itchy.
Do: continue maiming in the name of justice.

#3
You forget about separation
Of Church and State, upon which your forefathers persevered,
Upon which their coffins were arrested at the Pearly Gates.
Who were they anyway? You don’t understand—
Faith is your initiative, your palliative.
You desperately want leaders whom you can follow!
The great Whom, To Whom it should matter.
Nobody fits the bill. The human race runneth over, people
Aplenty, but you cannot find one soul fit to be a leader
Worthy of your worship.
Go ahead and endow blank-faced politicians
With supernatural powers.

#4
You resurrect past war heroes and retired colonels,
Take decrepit cabinet members out of mothballs,
Zombies, totems, and reanimating emanations—
Eerie repetitions—Do you understand?
Like infections stronger having survived rounds
Of lethal poisoning—
The repetitions are mutating Honesty into new forms
Of Sincerity, more resistant to Truth—more deadly,
Unstoppable, murdering
Everything you don’t understand.