Worklife
on the early morning bus
two dozen quiet faces
a thousand tired eyes
on the way to the factory
the classroom
the office building
the rail line
a man on his way to the flower shop
who will clip and trim and water
a man driving to the assembly line
who sprays color
onto big-box chain store signs
a woman preparing to tend
another woman’s child
a girl who steps
out of her apartment
to pour coffees, plate eggs
or to clean
soiled sheets on first shift
at the far-borough hospital
remember Aesop’s fable?
about the ant and its industry?
how it carried grain on its back through summer
while grasshopper fiddled
idle songs until fall?
the less you eat, drink and buy books
the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house
less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc.
the more you save—
the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour—
your capital
recall that if you worked from the blood-dawn of nation’s beginning
and imagine that you made five thousand dollars a day
: you still would not be
a billionaire
the less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life
the greater is the store of your estranged being
recall that Aesop was a slave
and remember that you’ll spend your life
seeking to please money’s masters
crushing onto the rush-hour train, the early-morning bus
exhausted on your double-shift
at the far-borough hospital
is this how you planned to save
your own
alienated life?
is this
how I planned to save
mine?
Notes:
—The italicized lines come from Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, a series of notes written between April and August 1844. These were not published by Marx during his lifetime; they were first released in 1932 by researchers in the Soviet Union.
—The lines “recall that if you worked . . . you still would not be / a billionaire” are referencing a tweet published by Twitter user Jeremiah Red (@_Floodlight) on Oct. 7, 2019.
Marie Scarles
Marie is a writer, editor, and educator based in Philadelphia. She's also an MFA candidate in creative writing and a lecturer at Rutgers University–Camden. Her poetry, essays, reviews, and artwork appear in The Believer, Entropy, The Rumpus, Bomb Cyclone, Tricycle, and elsewhere. Say hello at mariescarles.com.