"Have you ever noticed
how we are always climbing
but never getting
anywhere?

up glass-sheered avocations
and suits with bonus ties—

up **** with temperamental husbands
and secretaries with Monroe thighs—?"

It was a rhetorical question, uncannily rhymed, in the wake of
Collinses. But he didn't know that.

"We are always climbing on
what other backs have built:
the greedy gringos and their
brown-backed buey—

but i'm for Scotch and soda
anyway."

He poured out spirits like amphoras of sin.

"Oh, never mind the mess—
please, sit down.

What's that?

The mess of lives, I mean, or whatever
it is that greases the greenbacked highway
to the corner office coronation."

He knew the prodigal flames that lit the
corporate torch—the cirque
that stood in steel. He said as much:

"Oh what a monstrous architecture
of avarice! What a makeshift it is
and so much lost for all these stacks of
stuff. Sad."

I pointed to the happy pair of smiles in a
company frame. Levity interrupted.

"What's that now?

No, i've been married three times,
divorced a perfect three.

I know what you're thinking—"

And here, he laughed as he slurried his rusty brown transgressions with an index finger.

"—lucky man, he slipped the shackle
three times.

And sure, I'm dynamite by numbers
but ******* say I'm not all that nice."

"So anyway," awkwardly pivoting his grease to grin,

"you'll take the job then,
and I'll be commandeering your soul?" With a ****-******* smirk.

"It's a joke, of course—I can't just give you the job.
You'll have to show me you can climb—"

Starry-eyed empty ensued. It was enough to see
the rungs permutating above his head. Unclimbed.

"But we'll be in touch about opportunities—" he shook.
"You know—**** and stuff."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I am, and always will be,
a homosexual.