Ballad of the Golden Age

Today the “Dear John” letter came
In careful lawyerese,
The bank that I had lived inside
In all its functions ceased.

It would have asked, it said, permission,
But laws are such, I guess
And times too great for cares of loss;
The stock expired worthless.

Its cafeteria served real food,
Its pink and sliced marble
Foyers polished by old black men
Well-lit midnights were real.

For more than brass elevators
Led to grey cubicles,
These walls of glass were filled with eyes
That only saw the real.

Belief is all that money needs
To build these fresh new lives:
Belief that people have more worth
Than needed to survive.

No one can take away from me
The cheese on mashed potatoes,
Or flowers that I never saw
That told her that I loved her.

We build our lives on all such things
As money builds its life
On us—parasite of gilding
That costs more than a wife.

But where does it go, the two times
Over we pay for our homes?
As we reach the end of our needing
Does it become fully grown?

Or can it ever stop? We die
But debt does not, it turns
Everything into more money.
We throw life in its urn.

Poor sad money. A slave to our
Vilest and low desires,
Counting losses from what's lent out,
Crying for more buyers.

Does it become like that bank branch
In marble, an old-time
Ice cream parlor, with long dresses
And copper kettles, limes

Under glass, circa 1890?
The whole 12-floor building,
Each story a salute to chrome,
Remembered with longing,

America's lost tribes revived?
And maybe, much later
A shelter for lost boys and rats
Who sleep its elevators?

I asked “How could this have happened?”
“Stock on a death spiral”
He said with a gleam of finality
“Fear like greed goes viral”

And I remembered...

We have to become what we are,
The papers finally said
Along with the comics and stock tips
Carey McKenzie read

Before he made his morning calls
Where he sold avarice
To doctors and to plumber's sons
As if it was Mt. Everest.

They did not dream, these almost rich
Of scaling lofty peaks,
They merely wanted just to touch
All that humans have reached.

“Portfolios,” young Carey said,
French cigarette in hand,
“Contain the universe entire,
The shares of distant lands.”

This pitch, his boss, named Kelly, said,
Had not romance enough.
The flinty-eyed Jamaican smiled,
“My hart is way too ruff.

“I've heard the starving wail for days
And lived in cardboard homes.
These folks don't care how sausage is made.
It's cash and dreams alone

“Why song and dance some fantasy?”
In the next cube came a twitch
As Ricardo stuttered out the words
“I can make you rich.”

“That's far more like it,” Kelly cried,
“A dream to latch on to,
You'll learn, in seventeen-piece suits
Just what they want from you.

“To be the hero they dream of,
Who knows what they cannot,
The difference 'tween a put and call,
What's sold from what is bought.”

“I cannot know such crazy things,
Like why the sun comes up!”
“You'll learn, my son, that no one cares
For what comes down goes up.”

Carey took this bullshit in stride,
He was sleeping with Janine,
And they all knew except the boss,
Who traded her own green,

Like Preston, Phil, and Mickael
But dark Carey was true
To someplace called America
That no one else there knew.

Not Ric, the Negro genius,
Nor even fair Janine,
Nor Constance Frost, who mocked her boss
The way she grinned and preened.

In dead florescent rooms we learned
The power of bright labels,
How spin alone can make things grow
Like pulses by turntables.

The team got set to take a hill,
Charts and brochures blazing.
Our talking points were full of blood,
Our closing pitch hair-raising.

And who among us was not fooled
By the confidence of youth?
Despite our pelts of MBA's
We seemed to seek the truth.

With Indians and Cowboys dead,
The White Knights ride on loans.
With Robin Hood on crack again,
His Merry Men use phones:

“For God brings forth all harvests great,
We add to that a part—
The smartest and the best work hard
to finish what God starts

“From fields of grain granola bars,
From beaches silicon;
The mountains can be turned to gold,
All good things can be won,

“Our children can be raised for cash,
Health for a decent spread,
Our food is made by machines now,
Our Life's bought from the dead,

“There's no more gold but there's profit,
Of that there is no limit...”
“...Only the scope of your craving heart
Looking to be in it.”

Or so would say red-haired Nancy,
20 years on the phones,
An unregenerate Wobbly,
Nixon and Kennedy were one

To her, but Ree-gan was the dry drunk
She worked so hard against
By serving people, not their dreams,
Remembering common sense.

“No matter what you claim to need,
You just cannot afford it,
So you might ask what face or force
Compels you so to want it?”

And when it came time to fire her,
“Good riddance,” we all clucked,
“Such un-niceness to customers
When markets must stay up.”

And then there was the lad called Kent,
Named for the cigarette.
His father'd greased the rails before,
He came off like a vet

With tattered suit and Goodwill shoes,
He begged like he was poor,
Trembled like an alcoholic.
He won the sales awards.

But we all dined on lobster claw,
We all drank single malt,
Laughed with our friends, expenses paid,
The vault allowed all faults

To gleam like diamonds on the felt
Or pineapple martinis,
Or the granite of our kitchens,
Or the lamp of a genie:

We toured through Europe in speed boats,
Deep sea dove into Long Key,
Wore cuffs and paper-thin lapels,
Spent weekends by the sea

Getting smashed while the riptides crashed;
I waited for another
That never came—just some more time
To play on the computer.

How to fight an evil so great
It creates all I see,
When the books no longer applied,
The fundamentals ceased?

The news gave word of homeless folk,
“A relic of the past.
We're prospectors of the future,
We build this thing to last.”

Yet people always came and went:
Nancy, Kent and Carey
(Who became a jazz disc jockey),
Janine and even Kelly

(Who became a high school teacher),
And new ones always came,
New furniture, new color schemes,
New taglines and new names

On the conference rooms, but always
Endless office supplies
And the same old corporate art
Brought nausea to the eyes.

Of what we felt and how we saw
No one will fully know,
The streaming life in lights of gold
Long melted like the snow

That brought in tales of the ascension,
Earth life forever changed,
Enlightened masters merged with us,
The Earth grid re-arranged,

Another New Jerusalem
But what it would consist
Besides all minds in harmony
Was anybody's guess:

Commands in light and channelled codes
And ramped-up DNA,
5-Dimensional light bodies,
Reunions with twin rays,

Atlantis grief releasing free,
Ancient secrets revealed,
Light beings visible in the air,
The Pineal unsealed.

Along with this, some change was cast
Before we could be free
Of money, food or need of sleep,
A change we soon would see.

But it did not turn out quite like
Our Christ-minds could surmise.
We saw the slave ship we hopped on
And felt the choking ties.

It's here, they said, to set us free
Finally and for real,
The world was what we created,
The light could always heal.

It didn't seem like that under
The constant compromise
Of selves that never could agree,
For under a disguise

Of unity, things were hopeless.
We gazed out at our pools
That seemed as shallow as our worth.
We wore the mask of fools

For customers and for bosses,
With nothing of ourself.
The Vuittons and LS's that
We owed on were our wealth.

Where was the soul they promised us?
It all was lost in moments
That left us all with nothing once
Again. All of it spent

In waiting, the self we couldn't
Corral, the needs we couldn't
Quash. People dying to be free;
We told ourselves we wouldn't,

“That's so 20th century,
Anxiety and grieving.”
In the end the ones who shared the dream
Instead would all be leaving.

And now it all has come to pass
Not quite as we expected.
My mind has turned to oatmeal mush,
My wallet unprotected,

The world still dreams the same old dreams
But something now is different.
I finally found my own way out
From dreams that came and went.

So when that lovely letter came
I laughed instead of cried;
To think I could define myself
For so long in a lie.

I AM not he or she or it
Or some matrix machine.
I walk inside these empty halls
For once a human being.