Recession Love Poem
Location
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.