Owners
BY MICHAEL BEGNAL.
It is what owners do
and have always done--
they’re gonna do it,
are doing it to you
and maybe there's no way to stop it
now that they’ve seized control
of the parameters of perception,
and so the first thing to know
is that the mind
itself is a construct,
but when you turn it off
you can get underneath
yet, the valences of the material
world are real, and
when the authorities’ armed wing
summarily execute, it is
real people who die--
remember their names--
when they have deported your friends,
you (all) will feel it
Michael Begnal is the author of Future Blues (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry, 2007), as well as the chapbooks Tropospheric Clouds (Adjunct Press, 2020) and The Muddy Banks (Ghost City Press, 2016). His work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Notre Dame Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Empty Mirror, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). You can follow him on Twitter @Michael_Begnal.