My brand value
Has plummeted recently
So says sum consultant
As some seer into my pristine hide
Speaking a bout
Clashing symbols
In the mark it place
Some limbic game how logo
Soliciting every thing
That can be taut
As I must be
Scarred for good
Pimping my horrors
To a void
Tear attacks
Or fiscal fits
In a world lackeying so much
I’ll pass
Perhaps in tact
Or knot out live
Still
Forever chaste
Know thanks
I do believe
I’ll steer clear
Of dis figure or dat figure
And risk being
De-filed
In order to sell ourselves for a high price, we need to pay homage to our brand. We often need to distort and simplify our deepest passions and interests so others can easily recognize our “value,” that is as such value may be determined at any given time and culture. In the marketplace of our modern world, this typically means configuring our lives to maximally monetize ourselves. Reducing our lives to money is a dangerous undertaking for our humanity. This poem takes issue with the assumption that we should spend much of our life trying to sell ourselves. What exactly would be a good balance? Perhaps 15% slave, 15% whore, and 70% free range human would be a good compromise. After meeting our basic physical needs, it strikes me that we should be devoting ourselves to the things that money can’t buy. Even meeting our basic human needs can be much more human than often offered by modern, so-called civilization. In fact, if we can trade, have mutual aid associations, grow some of our own food, build or repair our own stuff, we can loosen the grip that the moneychangers have over life, trading currency for the gloriously ineffable now. Humans are not machines to be ever more standardized, even in the most complex and beauteous contraptions. Rather than leveraging the seductive, money-making enterprise of simplifying and reducing humans to means to some financialized end, we should develop human relationships that harness the curiosity and appreciation of the unfathomably deep eccentricity and beauty of every human being. Then, we can move from boredom and cynicism to enthusiasm and bounteous hopes. This glorious movement from the bowels of an uncaring machine to a feral existence may be messy, even pricey. Nonetheless, the value of living undomesticated lives is boundless, offering more than any mechanized existence, no matter how tamed, how well-trained, or how profitable. Branding is not for the benefit of cattle or humans, and it is painful and scarring to boot! Branding is for the ease of those who want to own and trade you and every commodifiable aspect of your existence, rather than taking the glorious time and robust effort to see you fully for who you truly are, worthy of avoiding all mean ends, and courageous enough to face being de-filed.
