Wander

So should the man,
Carrying his possessions,
Never find rest
But walk to the ends of the Earth
And there perish?
He can't.
For, among the solace he cannot find
Is death.

No, he is cursed
To have no home,
To be turned out everywhere.
The world is all wilds,
He cannot make sense of it,
And, lo and behold,
He finds the world is intolerant
Of him living in it.

The reason it gives him,
Is that he, like the Wandering Jew,
Has been ordained to suffer,
For his grave and awful offense.
But he has never been tried,
The sentence was never given,
The planners have decided
He is an excess human being.

And what would it cost
To relent in our description of a home?
To accept a tent in the wilderness,
Or, from our past, the shantytown?
We cannot accept
That there is a home
That is not a house:
Two beds with a white picket fence.

And yet,
How many live this way?
In our wandering new existence,
Moving from transient home
To transient home,
There has become wealth
Built up from the idea
That a person can never have a home.

What, then, do our planners accept?
If we must keep up transience,
Yet ourselves never be
Must not we then be broken
Over the rack of the corporation,
In order that it never be approached
That a permanent settlement
Is possible if we accept what it would be?

For it is simple to say,
A person lives where they end up.
And, space that is not used,
Can be used by anybody.
We could class the whole of land
As the commons once again,
As it was before our Land Lords
Let go of the idea of owning us entire.

The Wandering Jew,
Like the nomadic Indian,
Is a comfortable construct
For those who seek to dispossess,
But the curse is superstition,
And the Cherokee were sedentary
When the American Army
Marched them on the Trail of Tears.

For, ultimately,
There is only one solution,
If we disregard the right of any
To belong,
And, as the Nazi planners discovered
After they had invaded the Soviet Union,
Those who do not have a use
Must be exterminated.