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Wandering the flea market, I ran across a box
full of old campaign buttons marked $1 per,
and without thinking about it
I began to run my hand through them,
these stolid white faces clattering,
rising and falling as I threaded my
fingers through half-remembered names
framed by eagles, draped in red,
white and blue, the toothy grins
and tight-lipped smiles, all those
straight-forward gazes into the shining future
of America, but more and more I began
to feel many slight pinpricks, so then
I thought of them as little vampires
still trying to get at our blood, or like tiny pushers
trying to shoot us up with the dope
of their false promises, and the more
they stung me, the madder I got, and the deeper
I stuck my hand into this hive of human folly and avarice,
and the more I stirred them up, the more I imagined
myself as some kind of sacred beekeeper
who had lost his leather glove, yet was still trying
to get at the lost honey of the dreams
some of them must have started out with,
their well-intentioned aspirations, a feeling
that one could do some good in this world,
before the back-patting, the self-righteousness
and the green of dollar bills that jades so many
of us in the end.
And then I looked up and noticed
the vendor behind the table was giving me his
You-going-to-buy-something-buddy? look,
so I lifted my numb hand out of the box of buttons
and walked away, my jaw clenched, locked up,
so that I couldn’t speak or even spit.
© 2006, Jim Finnegan
Jim Finnegan manages the NewPoetry List & is one of the founders of the LitStation Webradio project.
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