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Just Deserts

Author: 
Matthew Zapruder

The bank deserved to pay

for its reprehensible transgressions.

 

Even the bankers agreed.

But where to find its giant shadow face?

 

The next feeding isn’t for centuries

How to force its shadow body?

 

And what about the shareholders

weeping gently in the alternate boardroom?

 

Should they have to sell yet another painting?

Footsteps out in the hall

 

sound gently ominous

like the future at last

 

had gotten up and begun searching.

I sometimes hang out in the room

 

with the copier, the hum makes me feel

like the whole building is alive.

 

Especially at night, when I should be

home with my television wife.

 

She tells me eat your sorrow.

Those are your just deserts

 

where you must go without water

to beat that dead horse one more time

 

until it laughs and coughs up

another monstrously jeweled president.

 

Part of 'In the Beginning of Covid-19', a series of poems curated by Jason Dodge in 2020

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