On the bourse where poems are traded
One must always maintain a hedge,
Some contrarian opinion to mold plain-speaking into nonsense
And turn gibberish to perfect sense—
The empty room must be jimmied open, light let in.
There’s nothing intrinsic here, just because
The prices multiply like corn or sorghum
—The value is the debt that’s taken on:
The obsequious doff of a cap as comment;
The memory recalled of paneled rooms in fall where words were
Cotton candy, pink and sticky and opiative sweet;
The gift of a gloss like a kiss or a candle on a long drafty night.
All these things become like postcards from your own home town,
They all have measured weights in precious metal backing them
And are saved up like Andorran stamps, to be redeemed.
Consciousness demands an equal and opposite consciousness
But performance is for the shareholder,
There’s no product, or customer, or even worker any more.
It’s pay to play, whether you rely on the fly-by-night offset
lithographer to the right
Or if you manage to whisper in the ears of the big boys and their
infinite debt
Portioned out equally like God’s mustard seeds to every student
But unlike God with an agenda to narcissize and abusivate
As they themselves were narcissed and abusized
All the way up that wobbly ladder to be downsized.
You have to hear them workshop talk and theorize
With their latest autographed autobiography ensconced in your wrist
Before you can ask them, in the softest tones,
How does one go about ... getting published?
Or maybe the trade takes place after hours,
In some dim coffee-kvetching club,
Where everyone shouts their POV
To gain the attention of the fabled silent hipster in the back
With his lavender Corvette and organic cigarettes
Who would in theory give up his pretense of a life
To follow you around, buy you a Skyy, admire your every
Breathing sound as an exhalation of the Great.
It’s only business, there’s nothing personal here,
They thank you for sharing at the door
After they collect your fare
(Compensation, like freedom, is never free).
How blessed all this is, though, to be nothing,
Unlike these ivy buildings or those instruments of chrome
That appear to hold a value, someone giving what they own for them
of worth,
For they too fall to nothing, bereft in every bubble-busted town
From Portland to North Platte to Off-White Plains…
It’s now a trading floor for children, where laughter earns a sourball
Or a drawering a gold star; they were born underwater
But still their infinite value is allowed
To ask for more, to make everyone laugh at how stupid you are,
To brag that their rhymes are doper than Dr. Seuss,
To make mistake after mistake with innocent insouciance,
Ask for some common coin in return.
And whatever we ask for drops, mysteriously
Without us ever really knowing it.
