Recession Love Poem

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Recession love poem
 
Do you know that love that’s less unrequited and more dearly departed
 
How every vague memory comes at you like a moving target
 
about to blow up a building
 
about to raise the debt ceiling
 
about to sleep on a tent in zucotti park and say girl what’s this feeling 
 
I see you
 
Market crash mortgage rate morbid by necessity 
 
Your septum got infected but you cant afford the proper fee
 
You got that tombstone chic
 
Sulfer dripping from your cheek 
 
And I, an unwilling participant of your funeral
 
18 and in love in new york city
 
with the world ahead of you
 
except you are watching from a stethoscope
 
every car beep a heart beat slowly stopping to 2 am terminality
 
you see the sickness in the indifference
 
cancer cells
 
in the coffee smells
 
and dogshit, chocolates for valentines day.
 
and this is no depressed love, no, love  
 
the hunched shoulders all the fashion
 
dirty hipster glasses dirty pillow talk in your bed in bedstuy
 
hot like tempers and downtown traffic
 
like that lamp-light over your bed where we pondered over things
 
the way lovers do
 
except with you
 
every thought
 
would slowly rot
 
to melancholy. 
 
Like how you went to a college with 30 thousand dollar lab equipment
 
But you didn’t even have 30 dollars in your wallet
 
Your mother out of the financial picture
 
Your father out on that tough love atmosphere
 
And you are stealing a textbook
 
And you are sleeping on a futon
 
And you are losing your religion 
 
Despite the rosary of cigarette buds that trail at your feet
 
Despite the steps of the church where you drink your whiskey
 
Yes my love for you is unholy
 
Hot and unholy
 
Like hell
 
And the way it felt
 
To kiss someone already writing his obituary
 
To kiss someone already buckling under the strains of finance
 
What happened to that new york romance
 
It’s a city of dreams
 
And a city of fuck you asshole
 
And a city of can I bum one of your cigarettes
 
Because im starving and wont admit it
 
Because being empty is cool so why try to fill it
 
The ironic mason jars
 
Tattered white Ts
 
In a sea of your friends
 
Who knew it was you hit worse with the recession disease
 
And when they ask why didn’t he get a job
 
I ask
 
Who wants to hire a cadaver with a buzz cut?
 
With the shower cut off
 
And the punk jean cut offs
 
Raising his glass to the Bush tax cut offs
 
On that punch drunk love 
 
I asked you if you’d miss you
 
You said you couldn’t tell me
 
You said you weren’t even sure if you could detect your own heart beat
 
For your mind was already bus stop in a fog
 
Waiting for a future that you knew would never come
 
You’re now a 19 year old villain
 
On that student loan vengeance
 
With a chip in your shoulder
 
And a chip in your teeth
 
Looking for a place
 
Where the rent is cheap
 
And the women will sleep
 
On a broken sofa by the floor
 
As you make your way to your place of rest
 
6 feet underground
 
with an apartment complex 
 
being built over you
 
every comes up again
 
on your eulogy
 
at least they’ll say
 
you were the 99 percent.

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