The stock market needs a correction and
so do kids who yell at their mothers for more
cake love, take love wherever you can find it on
the fifth-largest planet in a solar system full of
people carting emotional baggage with stickers
reading fucked up at birth, mom liked you better,
dad ignored me, I should have majored in business,
and the humanity, oh the humanity, rushing from
pillar to post-it-note papers saying bring home eggs,
pay the doctor, pay the plumber, pay what you can
and eat lots of bran so you can be regular and fit in
with the crowd on the Fourth of July munching
hot dogs, drinking beer, watching fireworks explode
inside your head from the stress you’ve been having
at the office and at home that makes you wish you could
do a Gauguin and go to Tahiti, which is not the answer
because you’d be bored out of your gourd walking the
beaches every day looking for loose change and loose
women to talk to and maybe mess around with a little
but not too much since then you wouldn’t have the
strength to check your portfolio and try to figure out
how to not get slammed by forces beyond your control.
is a member of the Authors Guild and National Book Critics Circle, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published nine books, and his articles and poems appear in numerous publications. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.