In Their Own Words
Brendan Joyce on “Value Form”
Value Form
Turned that chicken into a week of meals
the way I turned that memory into ten
years of poems. Ten years of amalgams
of the rain. In cigarettes, six months rent
is a year. Fifty two to live. Mechanic says
five weeks wages to drive another day.
Yesterday, at the gas station a man said;
water boils at 212 degrees,
steam drives trains, you don’t need gas
you want gas. Lord, boil my wages into
rain. Burn my poems into chicken. Lord,
let me eat my car, let me drink the gas,
let me swallow the asphalt that separates
me from my love.
Reprinted from Personal Problem (Grieveland, 2023) with the permission of the author.
On "Value Form"
I came to this poem in the doldrums of a frustrating commute, as I had many of the poems from Personal Problem. Driving to a dishwashing job across town, I was struck by how little I enjoyed it, and how much of my check I’d been spending that summer fixing my old Impala.
The used car market had just begun to slide again, so selling wasn’t really a route to buying anything better, and anyways, with my luck I knew I couldn’t commit to the car payments I’d get with my credit score. I’ve always been astonished at commodity-money-commodity, before reading Marx, just experiencing the political economy first hand.
That we’ve built a system where you can divide your car into human hours worked, and come up with a number so exorbitant that if you started without a car and a college degree you might end up with neither. That’s cash, of course, and the world wants you to mortgage even your phone now, so I guess that’s not the best analysis. Drawing lines between gas and addiction is never a thrilling or especially insightful critique, except when you recognize their consumption as part of the unsubsidized social reproductive labor your boss relies on you completing before you clock-in.
To be racked with this dual worker-consumer consciousness in the heightening hours of ecological collapse makes consuming any commodity inseparable to the consumption of raw materials, extracted from the earth. So pivoting to these cracked open images of drinking the gas, swallowing the asphalt. and adding the cruel irony of my “love” being my workplace, it all sort of just felt like a no-brainer.
I liked dealing in ambiguity in the opening—are there fifty two years left to live, or weeks, or cigarettes? A person selling you something quoting the price in time, a person quoting something to you in weeks instead of hours, the instant empathy that repositioning can offer, these were all interesting to me. I walk into the marketplace––even by writing this essay––with my labor, and leave with only its abstraction and the deepest desire to attain something that’s real.
This piece was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and originally appeared in Midnight Sun Magazine.
