"Commodities," A Poetry Post

Everything from the ground can be sold.

Green beans and cacao leaves,

pecans from the pecan trees,

coffee, cane, corn and peas,

and rice

Sweet potatoes, peppers and thyme,

melons, pears and summer wine,

pineapples and muscodines

and cinnamon

Most on which we like to feed,

most for which our bodies bleed,

brown and yellow skins splayed open,

lain in fields to dry out white

Diamonds, oil, raw crude dollars,

like the whole grains, fruits and collards,

harvested by a struggling man and

handed over to psychopaths’ hands

Out of foods and jewels to hobby,

some madmen reach out for bodies,

sweet young Asians, Africans, Indians,

kids running down to corner stores

After consuming all the greens and

selling off all the flashy things the

evil cannot restrain themselves they

just keep reaching out for more

Not satisfied with a life of greed but

wanting to achieve immortality a

man will go to black markets with the

mind to buy a poor man’s liver

Not realizing in his haste that

a black market organ is a

spiritual rape,

the bold, black buyer

jumps in that life boat

forgetting that Satan is a

renegade giver

Everything from the ground can be sold.

Seems like there should be a rule that

peoples can’t be bartered off like

jewelry, soft drinks, clothes and food.

Sure,

there’s some law in some great book

written to decry its legality,

but in practice and talks where the

wicked men walk,

a man and his woman,

his first born and his children,

his mother and father are

commodities.

T. D. James-Moss