Rich Kid, Oil on Canvas
I grew up thinking that wealth was the norm and my life, outside of it, the outlier. From kindergarten through eighth grade, I was the scholarship kid at a private school, swaddled in the shadows of the sort of trappings of wealth a ten-year-old might notice, like new gadgets and new shoes, like four car garages and kitchen islands and endless back yards and third floors, all the tangible luxuries that touch a young life. I didn’t have these things, so for a long time I believed life was being unreasonably cruel to me.
Until a certain age, it’s hard to comprehend that the power of money is primarily held in the immaterial, that big, fancy things are just a symptom of a mindset that’s mostly focused on, well, power. One key aspect of that mindset is the normalization of endless consumption while simultaneously feeling exceptional, or uniquely worthy. In other words, the wealthy need to believe that it’s totally reasonable to have a four car garage, but that it’s no crime this isn’t universal, that others do not have, that they’ve done something to deserve it.
The normalization bit is important, because without it? The wealthy would start to, oh, I don’t know, feel bad for taking and taking and taking while others are forced to beg and beg and beg. I used to think this absence of, for lack of a better word, guilt was a blessing, though in speaking to these former (were they ever really?) peers in adulthood, it’s clear that for some it’s a minor curse, an uncomfortable separation that can make them feel isolated if the curtain ever slips, isolated from the “real” world which is so defined by struggle.
Wealth also promises the annihilation of risk, and this is another thing I was too young to recognize while I was surrounded by it: where I was forced to be constantly anxious and aware of my standing at the school, or my standing in the world, all of my friends and classmates were infused with the belief that there was always a backup plan, that when bad things happened it was at most a setback, not a disaster.
After I graduated from Emerson, I entered genpop, and eventually came to recognize that my occassionally-precarious-yet-always-ultimately-okay middle-class upbringing was the norm. This was comforting, of course, though it also slowly but surely developed within me a resentment I’ve yet to get over. While class resentment isn’t exactly a novel feeling, my experience as a scholarship kid has always made me feel a special kind of way — I knew these kids, really knew them, and so I take it personally when I see people who have where I do not.
It wasn’t until I was in my master’s program at Miami University that I was once again surrounded by money, and began to recognize how its patterns play out in adulthood: at least when I was there, the school’s undergraduate population had the highest household income of any public university in the country. Money then followed me (or I followed it) after graduation, as I attempted to enter the Academic Poetry Scene, even though I didn’t really have the pedigree to rub all of the elbows. If you know anything about this scene, you know it’s soaked in privilege, like the types who casually drop they are third generation PhDs as if it’s a point of personal pride, and full of the kind of people who can enjoy the riskless life of making poetry, of all things, into a career.
They tend to write some pretty cool stuff, too, often experimental (because what’s it matter if the experiment fails when you can always afford the next one), but also a little bit out-of-touch, if you know how to look. I’ve always felt kind of bad for these poets, even though they are the ones winning the awards: their self-portraits are unrecognizable to most readers, so they can never really put all of themselves into their work. I don’t know, I guess they’re doing alright.
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Anyway, that’s sort of what this poem is about. I hope you made it this far because, frankly? This one kicks ass. I’m proud of it, it says something I’ve been meaning to put into words for a long time, and I know it’s worth your eyes.
Accessible version below the break!
Rich Kid, Oil on Canvas It must be hard to tell where the climate ends and you begin, sopping up what’s left of the fickle mercy of the world, warming slightly to the idea of ruin but always removed by the promise of tomorrow. The world is mindful to remind you it exists somewhere which is not here, because here mercy is never meted out capriciously to those who have not paid to deserve it. Still, you feel lonely when there’s news about suffering and there is always suffering: you are a forlorn parachute over a series of splat little deaths that don’t have to be remembered because they are not home. Some mornings are like this: if only I could put my thoughts into the shape of letters, you could hold them. You believe yourself to be infinitely translatable, so you’ll be sure to keep commissioning portraits.
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