301. A Poem about Corporate Capitalism

It's so hard to understand you start seeing some men sweating digging ditches all day and coming home late to their kids and other men going off in nice cars and coming home early to their kids and you say it's not fair and then you hear to each according to his needs communism and you ask your dad what communism is and he says it's Louie across the street you could see him in his undershirt with his feet up on the railing with his pitcher of beer beside him it's Louie sitting there all day drinking beer and me going off to work and at the end of the day we both get the same amount of money and you say that's not fair and you go to college and some professors say your dad is wrong and some say he's right and they recommend authors to make it clear and those authors are all trying hard but you're still confused because though they go into great detail to make sure they've got the right and wrong of it they can't untangle you from the New England literature your grammar school started you with where you learned how much better spirituality was than materialism just like in church and this one author took you to a cabin he built by himself on a pond to prove it and then your father asks where the axe he used to build the cabin came from and you think of your friend who played the violin divinely and could fill the house with spiritual music because her father was a materialist and made enough capital to buy her lessons and you see you'll have to try harder and dig into the root of the problem which the best people tell you is the law that makes a corporation a person and some scholars tell you that's a bane and some tell you it's a blessing because taking a corporation as a person is what gave capitalism its great boost in our country and made us rich and able to afford lessons for our daughters who could fill the house with divine music and some said no you've got to look more closely and everybody was working very hard, oh my how hard, trying to decide just which of a natural person's rights a corporate person should have, and it wasn't ever easy because to get corporate personhood straight you had to get corporate capitalism straight and oh my god what a problem that was for a person like me who couldn't even get Piketty straight and was losing hope until a critic in the New York Times (7-3-15) showed he maybe had it in a nutshell knowing that for corporate capitalism "nothing matters that can't be quantified and monetized" sent me down to the Museum of Modern Art hoping that the artist, a conceptual artist, one whose deepest concerns, he said, were "continually rendered irrelevant by the pervasive powers of corporate capitalism," might be the helper I was looking for, the final one, the one who had worked the hardest, but alas, though I saw many interesting and provocative pictures I saw nothing that improved my grip on "corporate capitalism," though one, of the word "Diesel" all by itself in one of the frames, did, I think, show that she might be aware of my problem, or at least of the area in which it is found.