The Midas Touch
[holy fucking shit i wrote a poem today]
Low-hanging roadside billboard,
a middleman’s emporium:
“EVERYTHING WE TOUCH TURNS TO SOLD”;
truer than you know brother.
For we are the gods who touched souls
and sold ‘em with our own to rock ‘n’ roll
we are Scott Walkers who stroke crumbling infrastructure
to donate the proceeds to our bloodlines’ humble
millionaires & we are pawn shop racketeers.
Default notice: swoon into its cold, skeletal embrace,
miss america.
When everything we laid our grasp upon is shipped
up up out away, the warehouses groaning easily with
the sudden vacuum, where is your curiosity?
Don’t you want to know where the cargo goes?
Why are you so afraid of being touched?
The Internet has shown me the same picture
for three days, an identical construction of pixels
depicting an eighty-four year old woman, a Wicked Witch
with a melted face from the caress of pepper spray.
The Seattle police gave it to her, a gift for her raucous mouth,
merely middlemen themselves from the Word On High.
A man with a missing wrist holds out his stump
and an empty cup to me in Union Square
as I sidle on by towards the subway stop.
I have nothing to give him. I fear his arm’s anger,
as though it would morph into a video-game hand cannon
at any moment. He has nothing to sell but guilt and pride.
I want to move to the countryside with Midas,
to worship Pan and his reed flutes; for this,
I would gladly barter my ears for an ass’s.
Laissez-faire still throttles me as I dart for the train,
moving swiftly through the hunched crowd,
keeping my hands to myself.
