Fire Sale Artists

Revised from 2014.

I’m down
to my last hundred bucks
waiting for 
a late paycheck
and thinking of Sal Paradise
who (disguised as
Jack Kerouac) used to
wire back east from Denver
for twenty dollars
and consider it
enough money with which
to see the country
traveling across the continent
screwing women over
romanticizing the hustle

I will grant you
it was the 1940s
Money and hustle went farther
back then
but now I can’t even go
to the grocery store 
with less a hundred bucks

I sit at home 
fuming and sobbing
counting pennies
trying to do right by 
the woman I love

The only thing I share with Sal
and his friends 
is the whole suffer for art thing
They claimed more joy and less care
than I do
the feckless bastards

I don’t envy them
They mostly all died
drunks or fossils
They were fire sale artists when alive

EVERYTHING MUST GO GO GO

I’m just the opposite
I wanna hang on to something
but a hundred bucks isn’t enough
in 2022
to buy much that will last

Anyway if poverty
kills so much around me
that I have to hit the road
at some point
I won’t last long because
in 2022
they just shoot the mad ones