Currency

Currency

 

Gnarly ruts, cracked and parched by unrelenting sun,

breach long piles of tailings hauled from the mine centuries ago

by men who sat at kitchen tables covered with oilcloth

wondering what would come first; paying the mortgage off

or the collapse of tunnel roof rock.

A withered and wrinkled sentinel now sluices this rubble panload by panload,

swirling scrapes and washes, scrapes and washes abrading

 driven yearning to find  flakes of a bounty

depleted long beyond timely generations of memory .

 

Lovely lacquered “Passion Red” nails

front fingers tap, tap, tapping on a table

in a jazz club just up the avenue from the peacock palace

where the polished band on  her next-to-pinky finger  was purchased .

Impatient and bored, her tapping is muffled only by the

crisp, starched and ironed  cotton cloth

 matting drops from her third-of-the-evening Gibson sipped alone. 

That she bothers at all, an enigma to even herself.

“All that glitters, darling, it’s only money. Whatever.”

 

Crispy craggly old  Alabama stems berift of their fluffy bols

picked by house-sized harvesters, and sent bundled in clouds to Pakistan

Where young children sit 14 hours whirring, whirring at machines,

happy to have factory shelter over their heads

where it doesn’t leak in monsoon rains like the cardboard roofs of home.

They  sew  labels of people they never heard of

into jeans carried by fast jets to markets where they lie in ordered furrows

of warehouses as vast as the fields they were born from, 

waiting for the swipe of plastic cards and journeys to lofty purpose.

 

Scratching, scratching with determined expression, the teen dawdles

in a laundry room, creating her  masterpiece

sandpapering the knees of her Gautier pants

just out of the washer for the 8^th time, for  proper patina.

Her accents of strategic cuts and scissor frays for style

are worn for  great admiration of future lounge lizards

and educated dunces vying for position and the right lot size

 for their 3 bedroom tract castles with a whole room just for dirty clothes,

all washed by a  not-of-this-neighborhood Mexican lady who comes in twice a week for  grocery money.

 

It's easy to understand the currency

but really hard to grasp the value. 

-jerry wendt 2014