Retail Therapy

In the poem it’s as if we are digitally enhanced.
This adds to our spooky action, at a distance.

Fallacies in our narratives are now being illuminated.
Dali’s is the best, his whiskers free like a cat’s.

This allows us to internalize any capital gains
and adds to the creepy action, but doesn’t offer

‘a ton of faces that would be super familiar’
to audiences awakening to the vitality of retail therapy.

This says he showed up late, with an anteater on a leash?
(In their fright and rage, the people turned to a demagogue.)

And no one could understand his English?
At the end, some actors had to be aged backwards

in the dream, its images lobbed back and forth
creating meaning out of late capitalism’s

ravening hunger, its unconscionable hoarding
of excess, while others go without, the spittle

quickly licked away, its smirk sending chills…
All we can really do, is try and figure out a way forward.

David Wyman's second poetry collection, Violet Ideologies, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books. His first book Proletariat Sunrise, also published by Kelsay Books, came out in 2017. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Dissident Voice, Blazing Stadium, BlazeVOX, Clockwise Cat, Picaroon Poetry, Down In The Dirt, The Voices Project, Squawk Back, Tuck Magazine, The Aurorean, Zombie Logic Review, S/WORD and Genre: Urban Arts among other publications. He's a fan of Noam Chomsky, jazz guitar and the visionary poetry of William Blake. Read other articles by David.