Recessionary Measures in Support of Occupy Seattle

By Ed SkoogOctober 21, 2011

Recessionary Measures in Support of Occupy Seattle



MONEY IS HORRIBLE, a bandage where


there should be a hand, and heart's engine


runs beat to daybreak. Money


and hands call to each other like


children at a pool; like this money


gathering noon into meadow.




It rains and rains. What is sleeping,


the mayor asks and asks.


What is a structure? The mayor


is named Mayor Mike McGinn


and he has made mistakes, asking


the people in the street the wrong




questions about their umbrellas:


is that your house? Where is your house?


What does it mean "to camp?"


Is sleeping political speech?


If money is political speech,


what isn't political speech?




Currencies: the arrival of their shadows


is the movement of obsession


navigating the aerial and the snag


persistent as grief or brief as crush


they hop forward or gleam rat-sleek


through territory they only sort and take.




What is and isn't money?




Many have been sleeping in money.


The money is congregating in the street.


Mayor Mike McGinn asks the money


what it wants and it says more money


and for the street to fall




back into its sleep. When police


shoot woodcarvers, sleep gets harder.


When protesters smash storefronts,


money wakes up more mayors.


Debate is the heart of this body


we make. But there is also the pleasure




getting in a cop's face gives you, or


conversely, just arresting everybody


self-destructive and nobody's better.


But also the pleasure of mere expression:


the sign, the theater, the symbols, the singing,


the paint that drips down from the letter.




If money is speech and a corporation is


a person, what is a person who is speaking?


Westlake Park is a cobblestone triangle


with a few blocky fountains, and a pool,


and planters that function as bollards


abridged by the Bank of America.




You can catch the Monorail nearby.


You can catch heroin nearby, catch


Bill and Mary Gates Foundation,


catch Mariners and Sounders, catch


a salmon at the Pike Place Market.


You can drive by and not know anything.




Money is a bandage where, above the oak,


blue absences arrive with gun-orange range.


It soars tightly near the real subject;


money is erotica that keeps its promises,


where it is always wings, like inheritance


teaching survival along the bark's fissures.




On Sunday I hunkered down too


beside the cardboard box of clean socks


someone dropped by, and was among


strange friends whose eyes I recognized


as more or less mine, their signs the same


black and white as the See's Candy sign.




To locate the point of friction between


the large forces of capital, speech, justice


etc on a coffee cup, or whether an umbrella


is a structure is why Portland is the new


Seattle. What are we looking for at Westlake


Center all night, after the park closes?




The injustice that proves corruption


pleasure of confirmation and the fantasy


that justice will follow, but this has not


been our lesson. I've halfway died


if it all falls apart in some abandoned gesture


of infinite alphabet. Dollars step into the yard




fat as gas cans. America crumples into a new form


and badgers sleep beneath their throats


and whales fall disused into their trench.


What is a human, then, the human mic


in the shadow of Washington Mutual


asks the mayor while it becomes the mayor.







 

LARB Contributor

Ed Skoog is the author of Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and the forthcoming collection Rough Day. He lives in Seattle.

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