The Game (II)

James Bowden

Since hot history teachers
seem to be all the rage,
I too had one–
With the only things I remember being:
        -he had WWE figurines all over the classroom
        -his insistence that MORE FOOD = MORE PEOPLE

And while that may have held
back in the “early days”, it
strikes me that more food exists
today than ever before and somehow
more people are starving
than ever before.

And so here I am,
doing science on the cutting edge
when for fuck’s sake
what I ought to be doing is simply
cutting bread.

My English teacher went on & on
about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
No shit, I didn’t understand it.
Imagine if the game, and being
hungry were inextricably linked.
I’d get hungry a few times a day,
thinking of you.
800 million people would lose
the game every other minute.

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This poem was written as a part of a coterie during my poetry class (Spring 2022) with Eve and Antonia, the topic being “the game”. For the uninitiated, the game is essentially that any time you think of it, you lose. Anyhow, this is to say that much context is lost.