I Who Have Little

I would like, when I was younger,
to have been a kind of modern luddite.
That is to say I would like to have had
a skill, a trade, a means of remuneration
to defend, if required with violence,
in which the skill itself had proven valuable
and had served me and many I knew well.

But from the start of my education, onward,
what I learnt would limit what more I could learn
so that I could never query any deal for work
that was set me up to be the latest youth employment loss-leader.

I could do nothing to stop M. Thatcher
becoming the biggest luddite of all,
with how she restructured work
so that it paid the few at the top
to make sure those beneath them
expected less, until they expected nothing.

The more I learned how to submit
to being a broken unit of production,
the cheaper I lived, until living the cheap life
was the greatest skill I had. I had no other.