Memories of Wall Street and Butchers Inc. (not Robt. Lowell)

(Daddy I want a pony, Daddy I want a pony NOW!!!)
Not only on Tuesdays, but for the last two years
book-worming in pajamas
fresh from the washer each morning,I hog a whole chair hidden aloft in the Borough of Queen's
shy of "hardly passionate 30th Ave"where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican."I have a nine months' grudge,
new enough to seem as if I have held it
my whole life.
Like the sun that rises
in flame-flamingo infants' hearts.Those were the coke fueled, “greed is good” Eighties,
and I am thirty and broke.
Ought I to regret my seedtime?I was a fire-breathing man, a misguided believer
in calloused hands and their protestant code of ethics.I made mistakes with my manic statement,
telling off the state and market, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside defaulters and the no longer “entitled”…Given a year, on certain days
in those rare minutes of roof time
I could spy gluttonous monks
hustling along the Street;a pillared, stern enclosure like
those historically built for bakcheia,
and through the steel screened portholes
saw the once a day Exchanging
beyond the sooty entanglements.Pacing, I yammered the theories of Agamben with Eyal,
Us both jaundice-yellow
("awash in our shrunken theory")
and as fly-weight economists,so held all front stand, short sold,
he wore his work shoes,
he knew the weight of a hammer,
he preferred bruised fruit.He tried to convert the Representatives,
the exchangers, and
the commerce men on our guard,
to his ascetic ideological diet.Shaven, muscular, suburban,
wearing grey wool blend bespoke suits,
they blew their tops and
beat him black and blue.I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the credit default swap.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a wage labor sucker."He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of the Liquidity Czar,
there piling towels on a rack,or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to us common men:
a 60 inch screen, a humidor, an Eames lounger,
and extended furlows to a day spa;
he returns with two cynical toy American flags.Flabby, bald, filled with avarice,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the promised pardon
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost transactions.
..and finally the REAL Robert Lowell, as there are no analogs or usurpers.