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](https://gibbonspoetry.com/) 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](https://www.factandfictionbooks.com/weeds-signed) at Missoula's best independent bookstore, Fact & Fiction.
Episode 117: Billy Collins' "The Lanyard"
Episode 116: Donne's Holy Sonnet VII ("At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners, Blow")
Episode 115: Hughes' "I, Too, Sing America"
Episode 114: Donne's "Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward"
Episode 113: William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say"
Episode 112: Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Blackbird"
Episode 111: Anonymous' "Wulf" (translated from the Anglo-Saxon by Kevin Crossley-Holland)
Episode 110: Keats' "To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent"
Episode 109: Dickinson's "Some Keep the Sabbath by Going to Church"
Episode 108: Frost's "Two Tramps in Mud Time"
Episode 107: Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree"
Episode 106: Silverstein's "Sick"
Episode 105: Shelley's "Ozymandias"
Episode 104: E. E. Cummings' "i thank You God for most this amazing"
Episode 103: Louis Simpson's "Chocolates"
Episode 102: Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays"
Episode 101: Milton's "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent"
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