Eat All You Want

Chinese trollers Cranes and pulleys motor oil saliva Fishhook cockroach antennas dipped to the oceans Thousands of sailing creepy crawlers Bandits with razors Cross the boundless seas Devours crumbs of every kind of confiscated fish Left to crawl or swim on the ocean floor The hulls share their creaking space With bunks for 20-year-old sailor slaves Signed on Then denied Port for up to three years “Mama mama rescue me.” Messages from tossed beer bottles If these young men get sick or hurt Sometimes over the side they go Fish guts Transfer the catch to larger Chinese factory ships Shadows slinking under the middle-ocean moons That spoon the salt from emptied seas Every Treaty and Border violated Back to China On ice The raped slave girls in blue uniforms Sold from North Korea for two years a piece Slice and dice with knives Fish heads and sucker arms Sliding along the bloody Chinese assembly lines 18 hours a day with an evening beating Seven days a week Packaged tagged Up sold again North Korea’s skin in the game? Meat to fund their nuclear missiles Oh Don’t bother blaming the CCP Biden Trump Moon or Corporate America It is we The religious consumer Who have been sufficiently and recently Re-trained To have an insatiable appetite To woof down Calamari Thought you’d like to know Though The long modern journey of re-branded squid.