Who Is Fittest?
ERIC CHAET
(first published at 100 So-Called Poems)
Who is fittest? most capable?
Who sees, in a fragment of aggregate, all mass & forces—
electromagnetic, phases, momentum, torque, transformation?
Who sees Sun, photosynthesis, & homeodynamic species
operating in an array of cultivars, or in a weed deployed
mid asphalt, signs, debris, vehicles, buildings, & contestants
&, coping with parasites & predators, conscientiously advances?
Who sees the soul of everyone who ever lived or ever will
in anyone encountered—& gains from each encounter?
Who has made the most progress from whatever
the initial situation realized & responded to?
Who is best organized? Who is least deluded?
Who is most skillful? Who is truly wealthiest?
Which skills, inventories, portfolios are truly most valuable?
Who is freest of others’ evaluations
least manipulated by others’ folly, cunning, aggression
or by traumas never yet come to terms with
or programming, or immature inferences & approximations?
Whose ability to act is least encumbered?
Whose data is most comprehensive, integrated, & up-to-date?
Whose aim is most accurate & realistic?
Which messages are noise or assaults?—which catalyze symbiosis?
Who incorporates best algorithms, rejects entelechy-arresters?
Who is truly mightiest?
Who is freest to operate deliberately, intentionally?
Who is most relaxed about death’s inevitability?
Whose focus is strongest & most precise & advantageous?
Who is wise? Who is righteous?
Whose compassion discerns between
those suffering from bad luck or others’ oppression
& those suffering from unwillingness to do what they must?
Who knows injustice’s scale, & his or her beneficiary & victim roles
& dependence on light, leaves, neurons, wage-slaves, oligarchs?
Who is unraveling his or her propped-up self-esteem?
Who dares to be afraid, yet risk being good?
Who, always starting embryonic, is becoming more & more effective?
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 Ioannis Ritos from Pexels]
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