Neither Proud Nor Ashamed
ERIC CHAET
(originally published at So-Called Poems)
Being a poet, engineer, physician
or farmer, grocer, builder
plumber, electrician, programmer
reporter, editor, professor, historian
star performer, clerk, or artisan
or judge or president or partisan
of this or that transformative ideology
or allocator of everything with a price
& others’ time, attention, & efforts–
is nothing to be proud or ashamed of.
Have you yet made yourself capable of doing
& Is what you have done so far to the advantage
not of predators or parasites–
but of those willing to pay for what they get
by contributing to others’ well-being & fulfillment?
Is there any more justice–
or do violence, threat of violence, & sly persuasion
rule as much as when you became aware?
SEE ALSO
Eric Chaet, born Chicago, 1945, South Side, beaten, denigrated, sinking, swimming—servant of a refractory nation and species, sweating laborer in factories and warehouses, wearing jacket and tie in offices and classrooms—”so-called poems” published and posted around the world, sporadically, for decades—author of People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways (read a review) and How To Change the World Forever For Better—perpetual polymath student, synthesizer of specialists’ insights and methods, solo consultant regarding space exploration and accidents involving obsolete industrial machinery—album of songs Solid and Sound—hitchhiked back and forth between the Pacific and Atlantic, sleeping out for years and subsisting on water and sunflower seeds, stapling a series of 1500 posters he made to utility poles, inciting whoever saw them to seize the responsibility for their own lives—governing without coalition or means of or inclination to coerce or confiscate, from below, approximately invisible.
[Photo by Tegan Mierle on Unsplash]
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