In abandoned factories gather abandoned people

who no longer do anything with abandon.

 

Look!  An assembly worker without a thing to build

like a sharecropper without soil to turn.

 

The massive conveyor system of steady employment

has broken, the machinery of work has ground

 

to a halt, the rope unravels that leads to hope.

Wealth begets wealth.  Only poverty

 

gets redistributed among the poor.

See?  A rich person is unlike any other, distinguishable,

 

but a poor person is like all others, extinguishable.

The large man in the photo crouching

 

in the dimly lit corner, he could be a street orphan,

or turned another way, a single mom.

 

***

 

Jeff Burt has works in manufacturing.  He has work in Thrice Fiction, Mobius:  A Journal for Social Change, Star 82 Review, Storm Cellar, and Word Soup.  He won the 2011 SuRaa short fiction award.