Archive
04/01/10 - (2)
Texas-Size Cigars
It's the start-early after-work happy hour for the financial world, Which is giddy from another heyday of the robust stock market, And a retinue of its youthful mover-and-shaker traders Is exuberantly celebrating, out on this restaurant's patio, Ten, twenty stories below their offices. After all, spring is singing its eighty-six-degree/dollar-sign praises For the four white guys (Wearing identical black suits, white dress shirts, Light-blue or -yellow or -pink silk ties, Conspicuously pointy, spit-shined, Italian-designer shoes) And for their fifth-wheel, life-of-the-party, laugh-a-minute gal Friday, Dressed, to the sexy nines, in extra-tight black slacks, Black blouse and pumps — paper pusher for this "success team." It just must be a day of jubilation; The U.S. must be investing again, lending again, borrowing again, Betting that subprime mortgages will belly-flop again, Go belly-up again, and that the gullible, bankrupt jelly-belly public Will, once again, in a great-recession double dip of mass panic, Suck hind tit, even as these four white guys Draw deeply, with colossal satisfaction, on their identical stogies, Their smug, smacking lips sucking the clipped maduro tips Of their ten-dollar Texas-size smokes, Between gulps — bottle after bottle — of Sam Adams long-necks, Raising their voices higher than the nearby intersection's din, Broadcasting hallelujahs to the Dow's endless ascendency, No matter that John Q. Doe and Joan W. Public Have moved in with their wheelchaired father and demented mother And their son and daughter-in-law or daughter and son-in-law, All of them strapped for cash, jobless, awaiting foreclosure, Wondering where they'll be, three months from today. Meanwhile, this look-at-me table of pudgy, shaved-headed alpha males, Believing themselves to be Buffets, Soroses, Icahns, Perelmans, And the token cheerleader of these commission commandos, Are on and off the Bluetooths headsets of their Blackberries, Amidst swigs, puffs, guffaws, and hands-on camaraderie. They've taken whatever glory there was in this soaring spring dusk And reduced it to a derivative of happiness That gets pawned off, to everyone still seated on this patio, As blithering, hysterical rataplan and acrid, overpriced vapors — The only things America still makes better than anyone else.
04/01/10 - (2)
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