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The Rant of a Curmudgeon on the Roof
This is Brompton’s cocktail for the masses
a slow decay expressed
through a culture swallowed
in a digestible polymer coating
skin hyaline and illumined
inviting one and all to take the dulling plunge;
I drank for two weeks straight
when I found out that E. L. James
made $95 million in 2012
and took the title of highest paid ink-slinger
of both the literary and eroticized fan-fiction scene;
I got stoned for days
when I did the math on it -
Leonard Cohen’s latest Old Ideas
and
Tom Waits’s maudlin immediacy on Bad as Me
turned in the same record sale numbers
across an entire uncreative, lengthy year
as the last Miley Cyrus single song in a day
(her fans likely unaware
or unimpressed
when the child is dressed and actually does
an anodyne acoustic cover of
Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”).
A curiosity and ingenuity
that was lost under marketing brushstrokes and various velleities
resounds as a free market consumerist approach to art
and leaves us thicker than we were when we entered the gift shop
to buy candied trinkets with food stamps
and the college fund we’ve started for our own restless anklebiters.
This piece albeit is, obviously, futile,
because these complaints
mutated into similar creatures
have roamed alike before.
It’s all been said
like the empty rustle of a late-Autumn juniper
and yet we’re plunging deeper still.
We’re trying to talk to the speed freak
in his suit
earnestly about Balzac’s coffee habit
(averaging fifty black cups a day when the writing was going well)
while he twitches and attempts to sell our sofa for a teenth.
——
