When Bankers Testify Money



When bankers testify money
Their eyes squint in disbelief
That anyone could not know--
That the game of bilk is bilk.

When bankers testify money
The citizens, secretly enthralled,
Crave to be the priests of lucre,
Cracker-jack vendors at the ballpark.

For the truest of les citoyens
Always buys the Powerball stub,
Always covets MacBurger and MacMansion:
Knows his duty as a toothless tool.

So when Bankers testify money,
And create it, when Senators cannot---
The masses reel astonished,
And Senators feign to admonish

The lords of their own fiefdom.
Hamilton, bastard brat, appears again
To Mr. Jefferson in the fire, praising
The velvet chiffon of Nancy Reagan:

'A true tale from the Old West
Brought to you by Twenty-Mule Team Borax'.
La luxe, you see, is quite as sweet
As the Summum Bonum.

For after the assassinations
Vice becomes virtue, and virtue vice,
General Grant learns to weep
Before General Lee,

St Paul falls from the Areopagus,
Kant leaps into winding sheets,
Mortmain stuns the Gautama
And dead-stock stinks worse than livestock.

When bankers testify money
The mad bull charges up Broadway
Scattering feathers from satin pillows,
Bankers' potlach burning all bodies to shame.

Will Morgan
April 30, 2010