Recorded live and on site right outside Utah Lake State Park, which means that there are also airplanes flying and birds chirping and other people walking. I have edited out the other people walking, but the rest of it is all here.
Mark Gibbons is the Montana Poet Laureate for 2021-2023, and I hope he doesn't mind that I used this poem...
TEXT OF POEM
"My Life as a Capitalist" by Mark Gibbons
My Life as a Capitalist
has been an abject failure.
As evidence consider the living
room of this rental I've lived in
for the last twenty years:
this chair I sit in and the area rug
beneath me were gifted by our friends,
Bob & Sheryl; the two wooden tables
holding second hand lamps
and donated plants belonged to
our grandmothers; the hide-a-bed
sofa I inherited from my mom
along with the TV trays
we use for end tables; another
straight-backed chair and the handmade
entertainment center I picked up
at my old job as a furniture mover
where I found the legless entryway
table my brother rebuilt for me;
our used Samsung flat screen TV
was shipped to us by friends in Alaska;
the boom-box was donated by my buddy
Burt to fill the silence of the departed
one. The art on the walls? Given to us.
The only thing in this room we purchased
brand new is the (now shredded) cat tree
which has evolved into a scratched post-
modern work of frayed-fiber art.
If everyone in America lived like me,
there would be no "throw away" society/
economy. And now that we find ourselves
crowding the end of the line, to consider that
this is all we have, our accumulated wealth,
seems comical (in the way that everything
has seemed comical to me, the absurdity
of this material trip). It almost appears as if
it were a focused effort to have bought
so little and scrounged so much. Honestly
I just didn't pay attention, and obviously
I don't care—never did. So this is
the inevitable result—what's left of
the hand-me-down kid: one angel
on the right moans, embarrassed,
holding and shaking its head while
the little devil on the left sorts through
a pile of freebies from the recently dead.
You can find this poem in Gibbons's book, which you can buy signed by the author at Missoula's best independent bookstore, Fact & Fiction.