the man in charge

I’m thinking about bodies. I’m always thinking about bodies. Maybe it’s because I’m ill. Or trans. Or just human.

I’m hardly the first person to compare sports and war, to be disturbed by the way we feed bodies to the gears of industries, to balk at the product being prioritized over the person. (Which is hardly confined to sports or war. I’ve mostly seen it firsthand in art making and nonprofits.) But Ferrari, inspired by the life and misdeeds of driver-turned-business magnate Enzo Ferrari, pointedly draws that connection. A man discharged from one war who dove into another on the racetrack, before enlisting young men to do the same for his team. A man known widely as Il Commendatore.

Anyways the movie stuck with me and I wrote a poem.

When the young man’s body goes flying…
When his body goes flying, personhood goes with it.
Bystanders gasp, scream, cry
while the man in charge focuses on the car 
crumpling.
The body flying is a tool, just a piece of the machine -
annoying to replace, but replaceable.
There’s a new one already lined up.

What’s the difference between a general and the man in charge?
They both churn through bodies - on the field, on the track, in the factory.
The most important thing is being fastest or the last one standing.
You win or you die. No sleeping.

An hour or so later
(or a few years later)
the man in charge steps 
over crumpled corpses 
to mourn a dead car.

And maybe the others
(the tools, the weapons, the soldiers, the factory workers, the athletes, the young)
maybe they know what they’re getting into
but maybe you can’t truly know the depths until you’ve seen a mass of bodies from a distance
and strangled your capacity for grief.
There’s no space for extraneous parts in a racecar.