The new bank
officers' ranks'
are complex
in a new age
divided into the perfect and the imperfect
honorables
composing lives experiences
A population of the less perfect
and the more perfect
people
and money gets perfectly counted by the head
to balance and keep pace
keep a peace
with
the perfectly and imperfectly pleased and
the perfectly and imperfectly displeased
Four catagories
for anyone you can think of
without exception
excluding no one
but for those who are moderately pleased
or those who are moderately displeased
excluding no one at all
if all he contemplates
is pleasure
oh what a difference the whore on the corner
makes
after leaving a bank,
to the weathered puss
the bank officer calls a face
(not to be impolite, but all he sees
when he calls roll-
a roll of bills he counts
from a bowl of cherries on his desk
the wrinkles and aging strains
on the lines of his passing clients' )
Lessons him see
only
the weathering of the fields
percentages
ups'
downs
highs and lows
yielding
only
faith alone
only totals
that add up faithfully in his eye
in his daily discourses
with the horizon
to the same
pleasure of being
anyone
assumes
with the sky
and dance along
lying
with the totals in his vaults
only 'cause his weathering
his life and pleasures
are captive
to the money captive in the bank
vaults a positive score
leaves fleeting sores
cured
when statistics
fall and die
unnoticed
unremembered
in the embrace
with the
diversities
embodied
in the less than captive
at bank or home
body
weathered sales
of the
corner
whore.
Works to be all the same
....either pleasure or a sore
.... a sore, sure of totals, unknown beaten sky
obstructed from daily view
by the diversified
money erected
hard
hardened
earth.
Marvin E. Kirsh