As part of our ten year anniversary celebrations, Corporate Watch is pleased to announce the release of its new poetry book. 'This Poem is Sponsored By...' is a new anthology of poetry exposing corporate power, with over a hundred poems written by anti-corporate poets from around the world. These poems are from our new book, which is available from www.corporatewatch.org

An open letter to enclosure

The sun rises and falls,
Things live and die,
Carbon and water cycle,
Without names, sponsors or owners.

A rose, bought and sold, still smells as sweet,
A nightingale, bought and sold, still sings full throated,
A man, bought and sold, is a man for all that.
Time, without minutes and seconds, still flows.

They are not social constructs.
Ecology is not social construct.
Freedom is not social construct.
Life is not social construct.
They are names for processes and states
That pre-date society,
and will predate it.

It may seem to you that I am lazy.
Maybe I am learning to think glacially,
Like grit beneath a mile of ice
That collected, collectively
Grinds mountain to moraine.

It may seem to you that I am small.
Maybe I am learning to think virally,
A tiny fragment of life
Breathed in by vital air
That prospers unseen at its host's expense.

It may seem to you that I am a failure.
Maybe I don't think like you,
With names, sponsors and owners,
But with blue sky, out of the box.

Spencer Cooke

If (Rebranded)

If you can keep your trade when all about you
Say that fashion's moving away from you,
If you can trust yourself when shoppers doubt you
And make allowances for their doubting too,
If you can move and no be boxed by product
If being lied about then deal in lies,
Or being deconstructed and then deconstruct,
Ensuring it looks good, and O, so wise...

If you can dream and turn your dreams to profit,
If you can think outside the box again,
If you can convince the folk in your office,
And everyone in the public domain,
If you can bear to hear the lies you've spoken
Believed and turned into a lifestyle choiice,
Or watch your ethos become a blank slogan,
And stoop, and recreate its worn out voice...

If you can strip away at all the excess
And break yourself down to a five-word phrase,
And turn your mission statement into success
By convincing a journalist at Dazed,
If you can turn spreadsheets to prosperity,
Make Powerpoint serve you after you've gone,
And make your ego look like sincerity
Get your name mentioned on Radio One...

If you can talk with illusion of virtue
Live in a penthouse and still say you're "street".
Be something that poor and rich can buy into,
Be something they wear, live in and eat
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With ninety seconds of distance run
Yours is the market, and all the cash in it
And, which is more, you'll be a brand, my son!

Luke Wright