Caveat Emptor: 2008 Poem by Garry Stanton

I place my penny
in the vending machine of
Eternity. It grinds and groans.
Metal on metal.

What does my coin buy?
Mortar, bricks,
kindling sticks. A sleek, pulchritudinous
automobile. Or a serviceable
Philippino maid to marry,
(one careful owner) got out of a
catalogue,
pages, through the ages, keenly wet-fingered by
The Bereaved, The Disappointed

of

this old rock. So small now, it seems, a needle’s eye.

We drink from the bladders of the dusty dead:
Boudicca, Bolivar, Bonaparte,
a marvellously random sample,
don’t you think? ;
or we may feast upon the
sickly-sweet fecundity of antiquity.
Viruses stretch, mischievous aerial
malignancies,
and we sense their twitching probosci__ probepenetratepulsepollute:
existence as ring o’ roses.

Crunching Credit? A World to Edit?
Do we feel like minor aphids
in the tightest web, silkily glued
by the blind expert
arachnid,
who plots gossamer games
in a play with no end?

So mundane, Fiscal Pain!
See the spider of imaginary Money,
repose behind cloudy
windows,
laying out on his
high altar
offal sacrifices,
viscera to the Gods of
Virtual Accountability. No rhyme.

We talk of Billions,
We hear of Trillions,
Gadzooks, Gazillions! ,
Pointless abandoned
Zeroes.

I contemplate Billions, too.
I contemplate the empty-bellied,
the cataracted
the leprosied
limbo people.
I see the illiterate
the dehydrated
the hopeless
the plain desperate
rat-licking numberless,
fly-furnished
mass.

I see, in my nightmares,
the amputated stumps of toddlers,
and bone-mouthed hags.
This is a story without end.

Hah! , Gazillions,
Trillions
Buffalo Billions.

What does it matter, when
Congress and Senate,
important organs,
need the money first?
For every dollar
deployed to save them,
there is a further
nail in the coffin of,
the ever-growing
sarcophagus
of, the Damned.

Devil, God, Demon
Heaven, Hell.

How laughable.