This Week on Poems Worth a Shit...

Editor's Note: Please pardon our appearance; poem still under construction.

Revisionist History of the Titans
By the end of this
sentence the wealthiest
man alive will be one million,
five hundred-seventy-two thousand,
twenty-seven dollars and sixty-five cents richer
while in that same time, I will have lost
another dollar to a broken vending machine
and fallen behind on my rent. That used to bother me,
how the statue of Atlas in Rockefeller Center would gloat,
how he sported the sky on his shoulders,
more his trophy than his reason for despair;
how his buddy around the corner, Prometheus,
enlightened mankind without a pigeon in sight
to shit on his skin (to say nothing of the Harpies)
as smooth and golden as a 30-second spot
for soft light type light-bulbs. If ever I gazed
too long up the facade of the General Electric building,
its height representing its yearly cash flow,
I tended to shrink in proportion, to my gross income,
and thus bruise my shin against the side of a dime
for not paying attention to where I was going.
That’s how you learn the worth of looking up,
though I wonder if people who stand
for snapshots beside the bronze Titans know how small
they’ll appear in that frame, if they find strength
in never counting the decimals that precede their net on paper,
or if the only thing they can do is pretend they really don’t care.

Poems Worth a Shit

Macaroni Again
I can’t find the reset button.
It’s someplace over here.
Whoever said X marks the spot
did not understand the human condition.

I just keep on shedding my cells, skin after skin,
as if there were hope of anything other.
A concrete apron bleached by sunlight.
Or even better, a few voices in another room,
solemn and resigned, discussing my condition.