From SEVEN DEADLY NEAR MISSES

[When we know we are right,but are not.]

Poems by V.B. Price

[For the country that can’t tell if it’s really sick, or sick and tired, or suffering from advanced cabin fever, or if it has a terminal disease.]

FILTHY RICHES

Gluttony, that slick permissiveness,
morphs into money all the time,
an inner filthiness
hidden in the linty inside pocket
of the soiled tycoon’s tuxedo.
It’s building a house with so many rooms
that you can’t

visit half of them in a single day.
So you must
think of yourself
as an accountant would think
of a great many zeros,
your inner truth
packed like Scrooge’s swimming pool

with doubloons of every kind, enough
for ten lifetimes of stupefying
just-too-much,
Rolls-Royces flattened into business cards,
making the valet lug
ten thousand five dollar bills in a bag so you
can buy coffee and scones with a swagger.

To be a scrooge
is to believe
you are worth your own whims,
that it’s right that you have
every last thing that you want,
when you want it,
as you want it,

because you think
you’ve earned it
or it proves
Satan’s grace, or it just
means you’re meaner,
a Darwinian better.
“Give it away?! Are you crazy!?

Deprive some deaf mute
crippled bastard
on a roller skate cart
of his chance to make it all,
and spend it, too?
Deprive him
of his chance at joy, his

swimming pool full of doubloons?
So what if he’s got
not a fat chance
to jell
his nickels and dimes into billions,
or even a burger and fries.
Don’t lay that on me!”

CELEBRITY

Envy wants another life.
Celebrity is
the other life it wants.
Oh smile that warm smile at me!
Show those adorable crooked teeth to me.
I’ve touched him. A damp hanky of his
with his sweat

is in my pocket. Her lipstick on
a cigarette butt is folded
in a receipt for dog food in my wallet.
I’ve drunk coffee at the very table where she wrote the tome
that could have changed my life,
but I never read it.
Celebrities are already

souvenirs of themselves; they leave us
their leavings.
They step off the screen,
out of the magazine, bump
into us in the grocery store,
appearing in the flesh
in starched French cuffs.

The myth is at our door:
Achilles asking for a drink of water,
Hector looking for a Band-Aid, Helen wanting
to borrow your comb for a sec. Only you,
have whiffed her breath, have
touched the iced smooth, voluptuous calm
of her hand with your cheek.

Is it
that everyone wants so much
to be somebody else
that we will
embellish ourselves in the finery
of even someone who has been
just in the shadow of the great?

Is that the allure?
The celebrated trying
to be as normal as
those who touch them so
they won’t have to be
utterly normal anymore?
Would it be the same

if one day you saw
Hitler buying shoes, Pinochet
checking his fly, or Stalin
squeezing melons?
Not quite, would it?
A sharp, fast
knife would do.

JUDGMENT

Anger eliminates
the rest of us. It literally
replaces us.
Judgment,
accusing
or tisk-tisking others, is not
a raging but

an ermine
savagery,
a cloying fraud, a casting
of the first stone,
tormenting others
who we know
the Holy tells us

are ourselves
in different faces.
And our own selves inside?
Hypocrites without mercy.
jeering at those fools
in the baited traps
of our mirrors,

as the righteous quicksand of our blame
pulls us flailing under.
And even then
we see no similarity
though we have been told
again and again
we are the same.

And we destroy this likeness
in the name of accusation
so we purge our own
likeness of ourselves
of any sympathy, refusing to be
self accused.

Going to a hanging
and feeling safe, escaping detection,
mesmerized to watch
the terrible bastard climb the steps,
we look away when he turns
and smiles our smile, trembling
in the truth of our own

terrible near crimes
by any other name.
In the middle of the night
our hearts pound like the man
who feels the noose
before he feels
the drop.