The Cost of Everything
“Definition of a cynic: one who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde
Monday arrived disguised in a purple bordered Toga
Holding forth from eighth avenue
lawns of perfection.
There were satellites all around
To witness the droning.
Yet you lay there sleeping in stench
A live audience of one.
Take out a brush or a pushpin
To shed light on what kind of a world
You were born in.
Pick up pieces of planes on the ground
Use the twisted shards
To build a self portrait .
See if you can portray
Over-shadowed
Over-ruled
Over-grown
Over-lapped
To be over-stepped
And over-wrought until the sins you sought
Chip chunks off your monument
And pokes holes in your wonderment
And list the cost of everything.
Crawl on soldier of fortune
Until you cut your belly
On the grasping metacarpals
Erupting from the temple of the East.
Or the melanged marble of the banks of the West.
Or the soft cooked pork of the Art Deco south.
Or love locked in the ice of Northern banks.
Now see the mendicant in the mirror
Who was once full bodied , blooded to breed
And feed on the seeds left in a trail
To the jobs and wives in bee hives.
It’s the next best thing.
You have become translucent
People squint their way through you
Moving your ribs like webs
To see the multi-tentacled work-a-day nests
That they fly to like swallows flitting in to steel and glass.
One eyed, one legged,once upon a time creatures
Looking away from the
Never were
Never did
Never will
I’m sorry my old friend
It’s the fifteenth round
And you never
Laid a glove on him.
Joshua Kight 10/28/13