Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

" sex sells beer and cigarettes
God sells war and poverty"

quoting myself

on the face of it, those two lines
seem to take a rather dim view
on the human condition

however this view was taken from
a context in a poem surrounded
by other lines

does sex sell beer and cigarettes
or cars and clothes
does God
seem to be the reason that people go to war
and why do we have poverty

if I try to make sense of two lines in a poem
and talk about God or poverty
cognitive dissonance kicks in
because then I have to try to explain
what I mean by that

having said that living in a capitalist society
where everything is a commodity fetish
and then we are told to worship a God
meanwhile war is a commodity
what kind of world is this

in any case, the poet is a philosopher
but has no solution to the obvious predicament
I only offer the eye of the poet

I can see certain words that maybe say something
about nothing, because in the end that is what
we are left with, a couple of lines in a poem

... something off about a world where everything-- literally everything-- is just one more thing to buy, sell, extract or steal. As if it could all be pinned down to that.