Black Friday Blues

Black Friday Blues

It’s Black Friday again and I got no pay,
and yet I feel the crave in me to spend.
Where I’ll get the dough I don’t know.
Knock over inconvenience stores,
closed all hours of the day, like some
urbane legend? Tease ads jail baiting?
Cash registers filled with jingle juice
and George Floyd dollars? Helpless hollers.
“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
Get your climate change knee off my eco-neck.”
Or I could go rob the church.
Find out where they stash the basket cash.
Or bottle all the Holy Water at the door, wasted
now on insincere dwindle-pusses. Rob Paul
to pay Peter to pay Mario Puzo to play piano.
Go to Paris, to Notre Dame, and steal
the real deal gold-dipped crown of Jesus,
in a vault somewhere now, maybe Sothebys.
I feel like I need to make a mark
this festive Christmas season full
of pumped-in love, subliminal muzak
that makes me sick to my “soul,”
everyone going round with air quotes now,
lost in the mall maze, the Irony Age,
and Santa is a donkey pump this year,
I see, five easy pieces of Judas gold.
When I was a kid, so long ago,
Ma bought me a Quixote windmill
which I furnished with a pull-string
Sophia Loren, buxom, and full of love for me.
I went at her until a voice said: Tilt!
When I was a kid, so long ago.
Black Friday is here.
Time to sell my “soul” to Satan.
Note the sibilance and Satan gets no air quotes.
There are horrors ahead, mall’s full of zombies.
You know the film. Your money’s no good here.
The gargoyles were supposed to guard
us against the return of the animists, but failed.
The fire at Notre Dame cathedral was set
by Satan, smoking Gauloise, head sprouting horns,
looking like Karl Malden in that American Express ad,
that neoliberal con job offer
you can’t refuse or leave home without, in
Rome’s Inferno, where the whore Beatrice
has burned down the “holy” nunnery,
where goldfish Ophelias have drowned
in the dead pool behind the sibilance grave
where eels sizzle their saucy insouciance
in a paean of sorts to fallen “Love.”