The Corporation
by CS Crowe (March 2025)
The Corporation
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When the Yellowstone National Park Supervolcano finally erupted, the executives came together for one last board meeting.
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From their tower of concrete and steel, they tallied the clouds and the sunbeams, and they asked themselves, when the supply of clean air and warm light ran low, could they bottle the sky and sell it back to us and offer us pennies to recycle the bottles?
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Over catered club sandwiches with pepper jack cheese, they interviewed spring flowers and autumn leaves, and they asked themselves, when black snow blanketed the earth, could they box the black loam and rent it back to us, so we could feel it with our toes?
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With cups of Fuji water over filtered ice, they measured the white rivers and the gray herons, and they asked themselves, when the magnitude eight earthquake destroyed the EPA, could they embed lead pipes beneath the limestone, draw Mother Earth’s blood from her veins with unclean needles, offer her a free movie ticket and a juice box for her kind donation, while we wondered where the rivers went.
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All excellent ideas, gentleman, said the CEO, as he froze to death, Unfortunately, Nestlé already beat us to it.
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To Quoin The Term
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I learned we live inside the Patriarchy,
Because our lives are divided into four years wandering the wilderness,
Even though Jesus was born only eighty mothers before us,
And agriculture was invented only four hundred mothers before Him.
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Do you understand how little divides us?
Even time can be measured with the dented tin cups and spoons
Passed down from your grandmother’s kitchen.
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We rip up carpet and linoleum and find wood and stone:
How many families and their mothers walked these halls?
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We rip up keystones and foundations and find soil and loam:
How many songbirds and wildflowers called this home?
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While our mothers built our homes from thread and butter,
Our fathers carried an axe into the wilderness
To level the earth while it was still soft for want of us.
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If we worked together, you and I, it would only take us a day
To rip up the floorboards and tear down the foundation,
Imagine how much we could achieve in four years,
Imagine how much more we could achieve in a generation.
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Ad-lib Executive Order
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My first act as President will be
To replace all speeches with Mad-Libs™
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And the evening news, and billboard ads,
And the New King James Version of the Bible.
All the things improved by improvisation.
The Sermon on the Mount will now read:
Jesus [verbed] up on a [noun] and [verbed].
His [nouns] [verbed] to him, and he began to [verb] them.
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We had our chance with allegory;
Now, it is the age of the amphigory.
We need no parables to find meaning
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When we can write our own koans.
The bladeless knife without a handle
Will still be more coherent than Trump.
Call this improvisation because we’ll be
Adding more Libs to Congress
And refunding the IRS, in the hope
That more money will equal less problems.
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We are in want of Wonder in this Land
Where everything is free for a price.
Have you noticed? There are fewer
Rabbits running late for tea these days,
And when was the last time, on a whim,
You went for a wander in the woods?
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When they say our brains seek patterns,
They mean we are creatures of abstraction
It is our nature to find beauty in the tumultuous,
Finding constellations in autumn leaves.
And ocean waves in sea shells.
Watercolor paintings of twittering machines.
Tweets that end on a 198 characters.
In the moments of silence, rarer and rarer,
A familiar song plays between our ears.
We are, each of a walking Ars Poetica,
So, of course, the buses will always run late.
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When our votes are counted by machines,
When we reduce our voices to statistics,
It is only natural that we feel unheard.
An orange caterpillar is blowing smoke in our faces,
While he pretends to espouse wisdom.
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Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down.
His disciples came to Him, and He began to teach them.
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My first act as President will be
To replace all speeches with a moment of silence.
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Ruminate on the Fences
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It is a beef cow that thinks she is a dairy cow
All the way from the grassiest corner of the pasture
To the corrugated walls of the slaughter house.
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We all want to believe we are just modern scops,
Chewing capitalist cud until the day we make it big.
As if tallying our meat, our blood, and our sinew
Was not the point of the job from the beginning.
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Do you remember when we used to say:
The grass is always greener on the other side?
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I’m sorry I have to be the one to tell you this,
But the meat packing plant bought the land
On the other side of the fence, and the fumes,
The grass wilts under smokestacks and run-off.
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When the snow melts, the farmer releases the cows
From the barn. She prances in the field, once a meadow,
Now a paved road leads her straight to the gate.
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I Don’t Even Need Our Hands To Touch
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Oh, gallant stranger holding open the door to the corner store at three a.m. When I give you the ‘thanks, bro’ up nod, do you know I can’t help but see stars that aren’t there? The city lights illuminate the haze at the bottom of the sky. Twenty years ago, the night was nothing but broken halogen lights lining the streets, but now, we live in a rainbow of yellow and white, blue and red. Just normal people putting moths and fruit bats ahead of ourselves, and we realise we can see more than ever before if we just give our eyes the time they need to adjust. Because we are all of us, once in our lives, the stranger who says please and thank you, have a nice day and I love you. When you let the door slide closed along the curve of your knock-off Adidas, I understand why Jesus told me to fall on my knees and wash your feet with my tears. Oh, soul stranger, anarchist of the night parking lot, walking into the darkness with a six pack of White Claws and a bag of black licorice; you are John the Baptist, eating locusts and honey in the wilderness. Next time I’m drunk, I will buy a t-shirt on Etsy bearing your face and the name I imagined for you.
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CS Crowe is a poet and storyteller from the Southeastern United States, he believes stories and poems are about the journey, not the destination, and he loves those stories that wander in the wilderness for forty years before finding their way to the promised land.
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