Green

© 1990

Green

By FlatDaddy

Pinstripe brains and wingtip egos:
button-down business bozos
don their daily garb
to war in white-walled trenches.

It’s a forty hour battle
in a never ending war
with pauses while the players change their sides.

Hey, I tried it, man!
I was corpor-ate up with the blues
of shiny shoes and silky nooses,
fat gooses, power douches,
and it’s all jive!

Who’s alive in there? I want to know
whose show this is!
this biz of fizz and pomp and scam
 where power pimps proudly practice
all the principles of Peter —
all except the one who counts, that is.

’cause He’s too cold, too bold, too moldy old,
fashioned from fairytale fragments
too hard to piece together,
too complex for our time,
too fucking moral for our modern man.

Hey! sandals just don’t go with three piece suits,
ya know?
Shit, no:
you need some hip boots to be a modern man.
And ya gotta get around.

Here come the wingtip warriors:
brief cases of vast greed,
sububbanites,
subhuman, subalive submariners diving to new depths
to plum the bottom line.

They’re media messiahs, man —
mass market messengers —
and the message is the product
and the product is a product
of imagined worth which is a product
of imagined wealth which is a product
of imagined need which is a product
of the message.

And the message says:
Gimme that Green, man!
Grant me one, or
Washingtons
of molding, folding
trucks of bucks.
Your luck’s about to change, just
Gimme thin, flat coffins
filled with grinning presidents;
come spend your only dead man
on my bed, man,
purse my lips,
my hips will follow
where greed leads;
I’ll bleed, I’ll fart,
I’ll start to dance,
but fill my pants with Green.

Aw, son of Jack,
I miss your back myself,
I miss your smiling face,
the taste tucked in my pocket.
I’m left with Lincoln pennance for my crimes,
the times I spent myself for Green —
the blue times, the black and white cross times,
the red times,
the New York Times,
and it’s all a purple haze now,
all a maze of no-faze days now,
all rather lumped together, clumped together,
jump-start lays for Green now.

I won’t go back,
I can’t go back,
No one or thing can take me back!
I’ll fight, I’ll claw, I’ll scream,
I’ll cuss, I’ll gouge your fucking eyes out!
But Jesus, man, let’s be real:
The landlord wants his money
and I gotta have that Green.

Gimme some. 

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