The Death of Capitalism

One of the traditions of the Mexican Day of the Dead, I learnt recently while working as poet-in-residence at Hackney City Farm’s celebration of the event, is that people write poetry: either to bring back their loved ones from death or to send living people the other way! Writing bespoke poems was moving and at times quite fun: I sent off a nasty ex-boyfriend, an evil stepmother and a couple of world leaders. One person asked me for an elegy mourning the death of Capitalism. And here it is:            

Like the fat man in Monty Python,
you ate yourself sick
and your death is a messy affair.

Like the sad career of Mike Tyson,
you gave some mighty licks
but you were your own worst enemy there.

You chewed our ear off
aggrandising your own worth,
but this earth was just too small for you.

You ripped off millions
so a few could bathe in gold
but you ran out of human souls
to grind up and enslave.

Your doctrine of ‘each to their own’
left you without friends and alone
with no kindly Samaritan at the end of a phone.

Your obsession with growth
made you obscenely obese,
and you ran out of the meek and the week
to trick and to fleece.

You plundered nature relentlessly
until you had drilled your own grave;
the only skills you acquired were to conquer and tame,
till you’d no fresh water and no clean air:
where once was abundance, now nothing’s there.

Your worship of profits
meant that even love was commodified
and your soul cold and hard.
Now your corpse is putrefied,
your body bloated and scarred:

for he whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.