But My Chains

"Conceptually, the poem is an artistic byproduct of my current pining for an actual anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist existence...how different, disorienting, or necessarily painful would that life be compared to my now?" The author's tweet about the poem below. I find it refreshing.

Kyle Dargan

My Chains

But my loyalty
        points—my purchasing
        power. Nothing.

But my economies
        of scale, my digital
        compression :: companionship.

But my all-
        you-can-eat
        loneliness, my rail-
        rapid integration.

But my market-
        driven love
        handles, my accrued
        vacancy.

But my taste
        in artisanal
        bootstrapism.

But my choice
        of protein, of pit-baked
        avarice, of indulgences.
        [CHURCH collects
        as does CAESAR.]

But my supply
        side floods, my O’
        so buoyant home
        staked and sandbagged
        on striving’s pebbly shore.

But my internal
        combustion, my miles,
        my carcinogenic
        Kingdom Come. Nothing.

But my fast casual
        history—every morsel
        wrapped in a bank
        notes’ blood-sketched
        hagiography.

But my user-friendly
        righteousness, my Gross
        Domestic Amnesia.
        [In place of the old wants …
        we finds new wants.]

But my comfort,
        my tariffed aches,
        my engorged
        prerogatives. [I made
        this money,
        you didn’t. Right, Ted?]

But my ability to believe
        that what I’ve paid for,
        I have made. Nothing

        to lose, except ownership
        of this wallet-sized tomb—
        these six crisp walls.

- Kyle Dargan