Unlike many

I have always wanted
to think the best of people.
But nearly seventy years
of life have finally convinced me
that some people are only at their best
in extreme circumstances
of hunger, pain or thirst -

or in what we rich, totalitarian
sedentarists insist is deprivation
(no access, for example, to
infantilising education) -

and that most people who live
in employment-economies
are mostly more than
half-way to their worst.