"A"9

"A" -9

(First half)

An impulse to action sings of a semblance

Of things related as equated values,

The measure all use is time congealed labor

In which abstraction things keep no resemblance

To goods created; integrated all hues

Hide their natural use to one or one's neighbor.

So that were the things words they could say: Light is

Like night is like us when we meet our mentors

Use hardly enters into their exchanges,

Bought to be sold things, our value arranges;

We flee people who made us as a right is

Whose sight is quick to choose us as frequenters,

But see our centers do not show the changes

Of human labor our value estranges.

Values in series taking on as real

We affect ready gold a steady token

Flows in unbroken circuit and induces

Our being, wearies of us as ideal

Equals that heady crises eddy. Broken

Mentors, unspoken wealth labor produces,

Now loom as causes disposing our loci,

The foci of production: things reflected

As wills subjected; formed in the division

Of labor, labor takes on our imprecision-

Bought, induced by gold at no gain, though close eye

And gross sigh fixed upon gain have effected

Value erected on labor, prevision

Of surplus value, disparate decision.

Hands, heart, not value made us, and of any

Desired perfection the projection solely,

Lives worked us slowly to delight the senses,

Of their fire shall you find us, of the many

Acts of direction not defection-wholly

Dead labor, lowlier with time's offenses,

Assumed things of labor powers extorted

So thwarted we are together impeded-

The labor speeded while our worth decreases-

Naturally surplus value increases

Being incident to the pace exhorted:

Unsorted, indrawn, but things that time ceded

To life exceeded-not change, the mind pieces

The expanse of labor in us when it ceases.

Light acts beyond the phase day wills us into

Call a maturer day, the poor are torn-a

Pawl to adorn a ratchet-hope dim-eying

Move cangues, conjoined the coils of things they thin to,

With allayed furor the obscurer bourne, a

Stopped hope unworn, a voiced look, mask espying

That, as things, men want in us yet behoove us,

Disprove us least as things of light appearing

To the will gearing to light's infinite locus:

Not today but tomorrow is their focus.

No one really knows us who does not prove us,

None or times move us but that we wake searing

The labor veering from guises which cloak us,

As animate instruments men invoke us.

Dissemble-pledging complexions so guarded-

Cast of plied error leaves such error asserted

But stand obverted, men sight us things joined to

Change itself edging the full light discarded-

In machines' terror a use there averted-

Times have subverted the plenty they point to:

Things, we have not always known this division-

Misprision of interest, profit, rent-coded

Surplus, decoded as labor-evaded

As gain the source of all wealth so degraded

The land and the worker elude the vision-

A scission of surplus and use corroded

And still, things goaded by labor, nor faded,

But like light in which its action was aided.

We are things, say, like a quantum of action

Defined product of energy and time, now

In these words which rhyme now how song's exaction

Forces abstraction to turn from equated

Values to labor we have approximated.