Fear of Banks (or why I don't pay bills)

Fear of Banks
(or why I don’t pay bills)

Why do I worry about money?

With the craft of each dawn
given to ill-will spectacle,
a mystery milking in morning flesh.
The financial degenerate,
predicting nightmares by the numbers,
the Penny Thief aging badly through pill theft,
a swaddled lap to nap in the depth of character fraud.

In this smug sunrise,
pain pills squeal softly on spinning wheels
as wrecking ball coins dismantle the mind
in ruptured blocks of silver dread,
resounding in the rubble of
the coming day’s copper debt.

Why do I worry about jobs?

Halitosis melodrama in every bruised Monday,
MLK day and the subversive weather,
creditor cramps and a shelved stomach of food pantry expirations,
predatory loans and the tunneled distance from the holidays.

Passages in vinegary blinders
and apricot earplugs, throats pinched with skin tags.
A parched payroll hobbles in a tide of back fat.

The ceramic salary figurines,
slippery and expressionless,
a craggy hourglass shedding sweat
for the blind eyes of time.

Careers whistling murder in unconscious corners,
in matriarchal sweat pants and sporadic elbows
down the aisle of the warehouse mines,
pickaxed for product.

Why do I worry about bills?

Upheaval is the name of the money game,
introducing the death of upward mobility,
the downslope service class,
in debt to everything,
addicted to anything.

Cancer patients get their eyelashes back,
in the shade of insurance shams.
Skulls defamed while flipping
head or tails in corporate palm readings.
Leaves only the torso to exhibit,
a penny-less body type,
alien hands embedded in the evening.

Why do I worry about tomorrow?

Hitler shaped teapots on the billboards,
licking curled paint off the haunted house walls.
Watching the women who sleep
at abandoned construction sites
get their beers for free.

Rim-job rattles
from the ex-foremen,
driving recklessly
and the labor ready still hitching rides,
locked into life’s great, stalled car debate.

Sober slaves in falsetto sing-a-longs,
from the radio rations, cultivating the drones,
who pool their lack of talent for the Hebrew hook.

In debt to the drug companies,
which strangely enough is the company we keep.
We stay high for the same reasons
we run from tomorrow’s truths,
because, in hindsight,
we never wanted anything to do with them.