Widening Income Inequality

I live a life of appetite and, yes, that's right,

I live a life of privilege in New York,

Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning.

Say that again?

I have a rule—

I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out.

I woke up this morning in my air-conditioning.

At the end of my legs were my feet.

Foot and foot stretched out outside the duvet looking for me!

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

My feet were there on the far side of my legs.

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

I don't really think I am going to.

Obama is doing just fine.

I don't think I'm going to.

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

I can see out the window it isn't raining.

So much for the endless forecasts, always wrong.

The poor are poorer than they ever were.

The rich are richer than the poor.

Is it true about the poor?

It's always possible to be amusing.

I saw a rat down in the subway.

So what if you saw a rat.

I admire the poor profusely.

I want their autograph.

They make me shy.

I keep my distance.

I'm getting to the bottom of the island.

Lower Broadway comes to a boil and City Hall is boiling.

I'm half asleep but I'm awake.

At the other end of me are my feet

In shoes of considerable sophistication

Walking down Broadway in the heat.

I'm half asleep in the heat.

I'm, so to speak, wearing a hat.

I'm no Saint Francis.

I'm in one of my trances.

When I look in a mirror,

There's an old man in a trance.

There's a Gobi Desert,

And that's poetry, or rather rhetoric.

You see what happens if you don't make sense?

It only makes sense to not.

You feel the flicker of a hummingbird

It takes a second to find.

You hear a whirr.

It's here. It's there. It hovers, begging, hand out.

Copyright Credit: Frederick Seidel, "Widening Income Inequality" from Widening Income Inequality. Copyright © 2016 by Frederick Seidel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. http://us.macmillian.com/fsg

Source: Widening Income Inequality (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016)