Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

In general, I’d rather not talk about money. I’d even rather not think about money. I’d rather not worry about how we need money to survive. How we have to work to earn money. How money makes the proverbial world go round. And yet, and yet. I think sometimes we have to talk about it in order to not be terrified of it. More and more so, many of us are beginning to question what it is to balance making a living and making a life.

I have friends now in their forties and fifties, reimagining careers and quitting jobs they thought they’d have forever. People used to sign up for one job until they retired, but now everyone in my life is deeply considering what makes them, not just happy, but fulfilled, nourished, alive, really alive.

This conversation excites me because I think we are widening our imagination when it comes to how we can earn an income without always sacrificing our souls, or how we can become more than a cog in the wheel. This moment feels somehow revolutionary. The interrogation of capitalistic systems also leads to the conversation about how race and class systems are interconnected in terms of systems of oppression.

As an artist, I’ve always wondered, worried, suffered agonizing panic attacks about how I was going to make money, keep paying my rent, pay off my student loans (finally free of those by the way), and still save some of myself to feel free enough to make art. I remember thinking about this at a very young age. I wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t always want to be hungry or scared or uncertain. To be honest, it’s still something that I carry with me.

In today’s electrifying poem, the speaker leads us through an interrogation of what it means to live in a society where no matter what you do, no matter how free you wish to be of the system, money and power still weigh heavily on the mind.

ATLien Freestyles Over “Wheelz of Steel”
by Marcus Wicker

			        Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
				
                                                      —Toni Morrison

A paralytic sickness    bias    white flame burning thru red & blue cells
A ring around    the revolver barrel    roulette wheelz    Russian clan-

destine war    imagined happened &    thus foreseeable    Moral schism
hard for them to swallow as cod liver oil: filet mignon    backmasked: rods &

cotton    scalps & cod    Give a woman a fish & watch her envision an end
to famine    [which is the beginning of living upright]    Teach a man to fish

a market    & he will lure you w/    the chummy glint of an iced out life as he
guts your public for trophies    Do check for trout lips    at mention of any 

“system” | counter-    clockwise prison    built to omit marrow in its
trappings    E.g. shackles into handcuffs    into plantation industries

into wireless    tethers into “job growth”    Landlord says raining dollar bills 
when i hear bills    dollar    raining    When i say precipitous one of us pictures

a cliff     though we share the same broken     elevator pulley-    steel eyez
If only in the beginning someone said    i wish us both to do more than survive

"ATLien Freestyles Over 'Wheelz of Steel'" by Marcus Wicker. Used by permission of the poet. Originally published in Memorious.