the meaning of wealth in the new economy (2004)

    "Wealth is the means by which we fulfill our desires."
    - Interview with Stan Davis & Chris Meyers,
    Harvard Business School Publishing.
    This is when the cat stretches and springs, and how puppy eyes
    ask you favours you resent but relent to.

    This is why the rainforest expends its fund of seed
    as December comes, bearing fistfuls of rain.

    Consider the lilies of the field, the wide hunger which
    pulls you forward, the lust to work, earn, mate, the same
    gravity that binds water to sky, impels bird to song and brood, both.

    Remember the electric twitch of nerve
    as skin kissed skin for the first time ever?
    An infant's gurgle and squeal, the kind
    that brings parents running for a glimpse of joy,
    and willing to pay for it with love?

    Nothing but riches: between the leafy congregation of trees
    and the echo of a single prayer down empty aisles,
    each step you take away from childhood, thirsting for road.
    You have always known this bounty, the means

    to open a window and let the morning in for all it's worth.
    Through the doubling and doubling of years
    of weight, of sorrow; there's always that one thing
    you know you can never have, which keeps you alive:

    You hoard a little every time you put aside, in sleep,
    your daily dying. In your dreams of being free,
    everything you've always wanted
    to be, you walk smiling and whole,
    away from the infinite riches of the world.


04 July 2004   00:17 hours
a civil servant preps his staff { } atlantis syndrome