Archive
07/07/08 - (2)
Last Frontier
It's an exceedingly slow, dispiriting Monday night, In the neighborhood café I frequent, Four or five evenings, each week,
Year in, year out and out and out, As I count down the days of my life, in meals eaten, Glasses of wine imbibed, tabs paid with plastic,
Tips left on the table, in cash, To say thanks to some nameless, impermanent waitress Working her way through college...
This first night after Independence Day weekend, When desperate Americans (Reeling from escalating gas prices, the credit crunch,
And the astronomical rate of home foreclosures Metastasizing across the U.S.A., Like the fourteenth-century Black Plague)
Have shot their Fourth of July wads And are laying low, staying home, impecunious, To recuperate from future shock about to overtake them.
And doubt not that all of us know it's coming — Rich man, poor man, Indian chief, Butcher, baker, candlestick maker, thief —
The economic tsunami bearing down, on our shores, Threatening to deep-six us At Plymouth Rock, Walden Pond, Mystic Seaport,
Bury our pious democratic conceits, Tell us that freedom from taxation sans representation Was just so much history-book trivia.
Tonight, panicked by signs of a grizzly-bear recession, Americans are hibernating in their lairs, Terrified to come out, show their faces, in this café.
Meanwhile, I've made my punctually perfunctory appearance, Sensing that, soon enough, Our country will have disappeared, like its last frontier.
07/07/08 - (2)
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