“Surf’s Up on Wall Street”

Whatever gives us escape
from business as usual
promises only
the citrine afterglow
of a sunlit chardonnay.

The text of defeat
has an aroma these days:
we burn our history
and then pay.

Take the subway to Wall where the surf’s up.
The baggage on everyone’s mind
makes its self-conscious arc. Frisbeed,

Mr. or Ms. Magnifico not so much
as considered that their lot was here,
soft and adolescent as they once were.

But no one’s nostalgia rides a pale horse,
or cashes the blank check of 60’s cursed love,
or uses a gun barrel as a vase.

A faction of zeros despoils the scoreboard.
A new currency of sadness
seeking its own level like an abscess.

Everything we are has that rub-a-dub;
everyone washes their hands
before too long.
Maybe only to just forget.

You wear the soot of a hero
on the front lines of a Hobson’s choice,
but still smell the arabesques of smoke

in the ghostly twin carapace,
the columnated ruins
that paralyzed heart and soul . . .

A stone’s throw away, hard hats,
bright as balloons,
bob and weave in the shadows

of lighting plants and rising dust
through the evening’s chestnut air,
as if on the whiff of an instinct for home,
resolute as ants in a sandbox.

But Adam knew work
by the sweat of his brow,

how difficult it is
to reconstruct a memory
from scratch.

Published by 99: The Press in the poetry anthology,
99 Poems for the 99 Percent (2014) by Dean Radar (Editor)

© Steven M. Critelli