Check out Johnny Payne’s other poem published here on TGU.
Between nanoseconds I wonder
whether ectoplasm like melted silver
dollars can slip through the eye
of a needle. Does a camel
crumble into tobacco shreds
blown by the wind into the slot of an ATM?
Never revealing its chrome secret
the techno-teller gives like the Buddha
and not like a slot machine
that can’t make up its mind
whether reciprocity is really
a virtue. The economy wooed me
with the promise it was based
on rational principlesbut my girlfriend
said the same about our relationship.
O thou trembling roseyour rug burns
are all that remain of a love more exquisite
than chocolate drizzled around a large plate
with a small entrée in the middle.
Those sly Eastern proverbs
tricked me into believing that
non-attachment was the same
as uncoupling a U-Haul trailer
so I could leave everything
behind except
the last cassette in the last tape player
destined to turn its thread
trapped by nonchalant gears
into a twenty-foot string.
When I cut the tape into
confetti strips
nymphets sensing a party
appear out of nowhere
alabaster, two fingers shy of trampy
to conspire with the wiles
of a bit-coin shaman who flirts
with chastity until he realizes
its verbal paradox. The Silk Road
genius is going to jail. Now
who will defraud us with
a patois thicker than almond paste?
Moral bankruptcy is more corrupt
than an actual
Chapter Nine direct result
of the housing collapse.
Desiderata flit around me with giant wings
like a circus troupe of super heroines
moths that ate their way through the
of a suit coat where I kept my integrity
in case I ran out of coins to throw
at the meter maid that dupe of
democracy
who was “just following orders.”
Someone gamed
the global banking system
to cleanse the landscape
of overvalued real estate worse
than if Florida had actually sunk
into the Atlanticas so many predicted.
Panther, stork and manatee
stalk the marsh, waiting on foreclosure
to do what ecologists couldn’t.
Surgically enhanced harpies
in a collective taxi straight from South
Beach
incarnate the double entendre
of the word bust, and set up an
antistrophic
wail, an unwitting paean to catastrophe
because the nervous staccato clicks
of their high heels happen to sound
like a syncopated flamencogay
as the city council of Fort Lauderdale.
O electronic blips
sparks without a starspray without
an ocean, whistle without steam
please light up the sky
dispersed thunderheads from Jupiter
to Cuba.
Like a bereft octopus
at a pool party with a naked chick
on each arm pretending to be
love children of Paul Volcker
and Donna Shalala
this downturn casting off
its stale metaphor
can go all directions at once
without a séance without regret.