Child labor is desperately sought by both the manufacturers
and the starving children. Morality is another one of those words.
Sometimes there’s a haze of words, sometimes a fog. My breath
is one of the two. The palm of my hand is a shallow lake,
enough to hold stones and lose words in. The world is held
in God’s hand. We sang this on the spillway at church camp
as fingers of water spread out below. True, the earth’s crust
miraculously hangs on against the breath of all our talk, our tossed-
around ideas. Factory workers and children still forage in the dumps
at Phnom Penh, and under them, rats and bacteria eat away
at the garbage, and below everything, the earth’s core swelters
in its own juices. Isn’t it odd that we knew hell was down, heaven
was up, before we knew about the core? I would like to discuss
the consciousness that mumbles to itself so that it won’t hear
the hum of sewing machines in the vast rows of warehouses
and the children’s pleas for bathroom passes. How consciousness
skips along on the level sidewalk of words as if it were headed
to a picnic. Heraclitus says everything is fire. We have lit a fire
in the barbecue pits, and the thighs of the large people who shop
at Walmart are on fire, but they can’t help it. Things got heavy
so fast, to the point of combustion. It was the corporations who
got the children to make the T-shirts, it was the luminous ads
in the Sunday Times that sold the shirts, it was the carefully placed
words in the ads, God, we are all jabbering away while hell
cooks the hot dogs and heaven rains the iced sodas, and along
the banquette are the pump dispensers of ketchup and mustard.