Claim Money You Never Knew You Had
Pockets are forgetful anyway.
Load them down with change
from a week’s-worth
of lunches and the weight
sunders holes in them:
pennies, nickels, dimes
and quarters spill out and roll
away, fair game for the eagle-
eyed; glimmering
in fetid, shallow puddles
and caked with dirt, teasing
harried commuters passing
through turnstiles, refracting
fluorescent light over-head.
* * *
Orphaned in take-one dishes,
exchanged for dollar bills
in a burlesque of free trade
that encourages entropy
in the marketplace. Nothing
ever happens for nothing.
Larry O. Dean was born and raised in Flint, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan, during which time he won three Hopwood Awards in Creative Writing. He is author of numerous chapbooks, including I Am Spam (2004), a series of poems “inspired” by junk email (his poems presented in this issue of WV? as well). In addition to writing, he is a singer-songwriter, performing solo as well as with several pop bands: The Injured Parties (current); Post Office (2001); The Me Decade (2002). Dean was a 2004 recipient of the Hands on Stanzas Gwendolyn Brooks Award, presented by the Poetry Center of Chicago.