I owe my soul to the Company Store by Michael Ceraolo

"I owe my soul to the Company Store"

Good old-fashioned American ingenuity

was able to re-create feudalism

in the guise of the company town,

best exemplified in the coal communities:

the worker (peasant) harvested the crop (coal)

not seasonally but year-round,

under conditions set by the owner (lord)

that often endangered the worker's life,

entirely for the benefit of the lord,

for which the peasant was paid a pittance,

often in scrip redeemable only at the company store,

which used its monopoly to inflate prices

in order to extract even more wealth

from the worker-peasants

And if the peasant sought to unionize

to ameliorate at least some of the above,

the most-degraded warrior-class imaginable,

the private army of the lord,

used whatever means were necessary 

to prevent that from happening

Bio:  "Michael Ceraolo is a retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has had one full-length book (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press) and a few chapbooks published (among the chapbooks is Cleveland Haiku, from Green Panda Press). He has a second full-length book, Euclid Creek Book Two, forthcoming from unbound content press, and is continually working on new and existing poetry projects.