Pacify me, please. Set my soul to rest, please.
Adam Smith and Karl Marx can go to hell.
When the trickle down came it felt like cold phiss.
Debt laughed and took another day from my work week.
I think I’m down to one day a pay period that belongs to me.
I’m a worker. I’m the plant in the weeds cut too soon.
I’m the one you ignore and wish would go away.
I’m the laborer, the sweat, the bee sting in your theory.
Excuse me, Mr. Friedman, did you enjoy your meal?
I don’t have the change for Reagan’s street people HE
created when they shut the mental health clinics down.
I can’t afford the locks to bolt my windows, you know,
the classes Clinton’s welfare reform set at my door.
I work with everyone, restaurants are the world.
I work with a man from Peru. He loves it here.
I tell him how it was, he still loves it here.
I guess I understand. I’ve never been shot at for marching.
I’ve never seen my father tortured for voting.
I wish my taxes went to the needy. I do not work for greed.
I work to pay the bills, and I work a job I love.
I wish poetry paid...in money, that is. I wish dreams had an economics.
If romance had a figure I would be a millionaire,
and all my neighbors would come over for my Sunday barbecues.
I would build a clinic to aide the disabled, I would ressurrect FDR
and start a different kind of work, like taking down the dams
and highways of the TVA, like taking down the strip malls
and putting in stores of the Mom and Pop kind.
Oops, that’s old Uncle Karl and Engels thinking.
They forgot the middle class. That’s me, the lower middle class.
We work and live from pay to pay, never ahead, and just in place.
We are the ones who care, who live between the classes
and see it all take place, there’s no tower, no wall,
we are the ones of free speech and easy taxation,
the lower middle class, and there is no one to appease me,
no one who will pacify, no adoring students, no stock portfolio,
just a handful of change and a desk full of bills.
Hell, I can’t look back on jobs that were, on how I rose from
red clay and straw, I am where I am, Puccini’s La Boheme,
and we are the people who make your life worth living,
the working artist, the lower middle class,
the people who care because we are in between.
