the financier

my mind is whirring on the collarbone of the public transit vehicle, during my afternoon commute from Pink City to White Marsh. it has been a prompt take-off from the South corner of 11th Avenue and we have driven past a pair of bicyclists, a homeless Bencini, a Carolina pantaloon, a frayed Bengals pennant, and a pregnant mother chewing on a grilled shrimp sandwich. for reasons even unknown to myself i am carrying a postcard from 1923. it is Klimt's tree of life; with curious brown concentric circles twiddling against a parched canvas, bulletined and patched with tremendous speckles of humanity, love and Egypt. somehow, the botanical connection of mammalian evolution and the simplification of a leviathan conceptual complexity of the history of humanity to the level of a tree, has left me dissatisfied; to an extent, largely unfulfilled. in science, as in other areas of specialty, too much emphasis is laid on perfect explanations, simplicity and a tidiness of theorizing. the world, and life at large, are messy and anyone who says otherwise makes me nervous. makes me feel an artificiality in the thread of reasoning, and i sit down and agree because circumstance and inevitability compel me to do so. many of us are peculiar neo-Darwinians -prattling on a self-effacing circuitry of a godly creationist, a Proustian recollection and Dawkins -but without reason, rationale and conviction. we are led to believe by either the hounding Right-winged man or the country libertarian on the brink of a rolling collusion, clashing and exploding in the temperature of disagreement to only be left with a hymn of pleas, obscurity and semi-truths. this is an aside, however, but an important seed of my neuroticism.

the sky looks a little unsettled today; like my favorite Kandinsky art of the white dot. a patch of stratus clouds are meandering on the left field of my myopic panorama, in a slovenly turn of an incomplete 9, whispering to a rainbow, perhaps, and singing a Pebbles song -mother army- to the nearby cosmos. on the right ring, is the unison of a cirrus pattern; like a tertiary brigade devolving and frittering into a half-eaten doughnut, wheeling and carting in high-frequency whistles to the point of exhaustion. but the drop-ules, like drop-lets, never tire in their duty to a mathematical infinity. the rest of the clouds form a network of guitar strings, reciting aloud, to a bolting airplane, the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. what peers through the triangular wiggle of the central emptiness is the right eye of a sunset, almost 76 years old, fifty feet tall and ten feet wide.

there is a Joe Bertrand sitting to my right, listening to soundtracks from Bonnie & Clyde, loudly, on large Bose headphones. i imagine he is not a day older than 28, but has a certain maturity about him. a dark brown Elvis hairdo, artificially whitened teeth, ultra-thin nose, delicately crusted cheekbones and cobalt blue eyes make up the facial particulars of the young financier. he is playing Candy Crush Saga on the large screen of his phone and occasionally screaming out, 'what a fucking idiot!' after 24 minutes of one-sided banter i turn to him and say, when did you graduate college? interrupted and violated by human interaction he says, two years ago from Stony Brook, what about you? last year. and then i pause, and smile, and scratch the scruff of my dotted orange left sock and say, so what do you do now? he produces an answer with a spectacular amount of jargon from which i can identify the words equity, interest, profit and loan. he sounds rather metallic and non-spontaneous, quite tacitly rehearsed. the goal is to work with a select pool of people to make them wealthier; it comes with a lot of perks, you know? yes, i know. and i can imagine the 'perks' of your polished limousine, the silver tickets and platinum memberships, the specialist terrain of Melville living, a credit chauffeur, a hand-laden Ferris Wheel of glamorous twinkles, and with it the shamelessness of profiteering, the dissolution of a fraudulent magpie, the irrelevance of a hunger crisis, the cold-shoulder engineering of a green Utopia, steering on a monumental disgrace of your personal multiplication, your self-lionization and cantilevered stardom at the arrest of universal suffering. to me you are a sly, self-aggrandizing thief who displays arrogance in the name of professionalism, deceit in the domain of conviction, fraudulence in the name of customer service. your heart is of a burnt polyester, ribbed and corrugated around the edges, hardened with sulfur, and dipped in a Burlington opioid of sinister luxury. 

i am restless. i am angry and in the middle of a civil pretense with my fellow financier. i feel the insides of my brain fluttering with spasms, whirring like a hurricane, hissing like a serpent, bleating like a sheep, shrieking like a widow, and screaming and shouting to the roof of my skull. i sweat through the pores of my inner skin, oozing resin, salts and camphor oil. i am harrowed by the mono-molecularity of a corporate vision, triumphing over the cause of a microbial venule, slithering in a door of violent collapse. you cannot be so selfish, so self-righteous, so self-sufficing to think about the upgrade of a privileged eternity, sacrificing with your hunger a usual love, a celebration of dimes and the pedagogy of orphans. 

to all of which you say, money is what brings us ultimate joy -would you agree? i am smiling, courteously, and wishing you the very best in your future of stealth. my eyes shift focus to the cumulus Kandinsky; trotting to the tune of a Sunday mazurka repelling in the embrace of a Southern sky.