Eat the Rich 

let’s go back to eating the rich: start with their big, shiny boats.  
Move onto their bronzed shoulders. Become a great white shark and liberate  

everything you find trapped inside a metal cage. You are not a monster  
if your survival relies on believing this. Next, devour the veranda over the kidney- 

shaped pool, the centerpiece of the entire collection of exotic plants, the saltwater  
aquarium housing the world’s last remaining thriving corals, now move on  

to their children’s college funds—flush, fatty. What does it mean to gorge in plenty?  
Ask a great tuna and hear the answer come from an old growth forest. Devour it all  

with a bulldozer, state of the art. Grind out every stump, so they leave no trail  
of headstones to their blood fortune.  

Maybe I am mistaken; maybe they mean eat like the rich—Meat for every meal.  
Organic. Invent names for the meat of the young of four-legged animals  

and then move on to the bipeds, move onto grandmothers and children, move on  
to preexisting conditions, move on past homelessness arising from medical  

bankruptcies to the endangered species list, garnish their carcasses with milkweed  
and the eggs of monarch butterflies. Say you had no idea what they contribute anyway.  

It can’t be much. It’s only business. Devour their bank statements filled with evidence  
that if every, single cancer treatment was approved, the rich would still be 17 billion  

dollars richer. Eat up the empty calories of the lie that if they cured patients,  
they wouldn’t still make a killing.  

Maybe to be rich is to believe you have a higher purpose. Maybe that reason  
is to decide who gets to exist. Maybe that reason is to bow down to shareholders.  

To leave a legacy of poverty and debt, warming seas and dying forests; to steal  
from their children and leave them a planet waiting to swallow them whole.  

Eat the Rich, their children will say, and they will do it. Watch them devour  
you while admiring the views over your vineyards, as they watch their Earth burn,  

they’ll clink their glasses and toast to you, to all the nothing you left them.