property

inevitably cruel & heartless
is the first face that looks upon
a baby with the idea that they are
property,
s/he who is the caregiver,
seeing a child not as something to
watch over, but something to possess---
s/he who passes on this
mold of humiliation, of self-hatred,
of that very structure, that very
core,
which forms our adulthood,
which reveals our communal slavery
to ideas,
of which we become
property &
acts made out in the vein of those ideas,
of which we become
property &
cells in which we are packaged away forever,
shelved as property &
in graves beneath the ground in which we are
forced to become
“property,”
even to the most absurd of suggestions,
the most absurd of reasoning,
the most absurd of developments,
that anything was of intrinsic value
to begin with.