evolution of the poor

There was the unapologetically ambitious laborers son who was built like a plank, who everyone hammered a dream into, who began buying property at sixteen with a settlement from a foot run over by a horsecart that would never work right again.

So he learned to make his land work for him and owned half the town at thirty-five, trapping a beautiful young singer with few options by making her pregnant and offering her ease. Their son with his mothers face and his father's ambition would be a successful actor and become involved in philanthropy. He would start a foundation for his children to run who in turn became involved in politics: the daughter an advocate of the people, the son a shrewd, ruthless capitalist.

There followed a succession of upward moving marriages, the children becoming progressively more attractive and connected, the mixing with some ancient royal bloodline (ruined save its pedigree), the acceptance of political office, the denial of charges...it's only called a scandal if the family is fortunate.

The family is fortunate and no one gets hurt when the market crashes, when the torches dance up the hill dangling ropes, when it is suddenly discovered everyone's speaking the wrong language...again. There are no shamed uncles or cousins, everyone has a publicist and will climb out of the wrecked Mercedes with the gin-soaped windshield and get veneers and falsies for the ones that got knocked out and then being scratchless laugh off the ambulance and burn a small brown puppy alive (totally random, totally wandering by) with a tossed post-disaster ash into a trail of leaking gas. Everyone will poison their employees with cheap heat in tract homes accidentally and never have to ponder why the carpet is still red when everybody's feet are covered in dirt. They'll go first.

Some son will become a zealot. The family splits in theory, in obvious practice but stays a business, reckless gears of telephone wire, the germ of power having grown to heavy, falling out of his face like a plan.

The course of history changes in millions of bits of minutes. How tortured is a student sitting under a clock? (hands on his desk, hole in his pants letting the cold red seat seep in, eyes strapped by their veins to the minute hand making it's elderly rounds)

True ambition scoffs at becoming a star and waits to crown itself an ancestor.