Ezra Pound at the Stock Exchange

Later he would blame the screens,
the way they'd mesmerised him. Not
the screens themselves, maybe, not --
no certainly not -- their one-eyed stare
straight into his eyes, and not their
flicker that might try odd times
to grab a brain wave passing by...
No, none of these: the culprits were the figures
and the way they danced and flounced across 
the screen, they way their hips would wiggle
and their thick lips pout. The way he's think
they were the front row of The Windmill
or The Follies in their prime. And he
in his own private box, could sing:-

    You can hear the girls declare
    "He must be a Millionaire."
    You can hear them sigh and wish to die,
    You can see them wink the other eye
    At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.

Figures of fun: the dollar, yen and pound
among them, skeletons seen in the round,
seen by one small part of his fantastic mind
that put the other parts to sleep, allowed
no doubts or caveats. he'd brush them all aside:
I'm sticking tails back on the donkeys
at a party, he'd protest... but more than that,
I'm not completely blindfolded - I sense where donkey
is and where he's going next. I have a nose for such 
things, such I cannot fail.And more than that:
the party that I'm at is MINE! Come join!
The future's all in futures and derivatives.

    But thinking pounds had put this in his mind:-
    His mind had stretched and stretching, had become
    The World's Sargasso Sea,
    a calm stretch in a frenzied ocean
    where bright ships left you this or that in fee. *

But it wasn't just for self that he'd forgo all meals,
would work all night. He was the posse out to clean
the town for all posterity, the Tommy tangled in
the barbed wire on The Somme, the hero of his people, out
to make his mark. God for John Bull, the Kingdom and
this Bank! he'd cry. God for the killing that
we'll make! God save The White House, Prince Harry and 
the Pope! This time it will be different! This time
we cannot fail! and so he played another million
on an outside chance that cotton would come up again...
In fact, he saw it more as knickers coming down,
for figures had a sexual charge and mone was orgasmic.
As counterweight he payed out twenty thousand grand 
to say that concrete would be hitting a new low.

    With Futura has no man a house of good stone
    
    Stone cutter is kept from his stone
    weaver is kept from his loom
    with FUTURA
    wool comes not to market
    FUTURA is a murrain, futura
    blunteth the needle in the maid's hand
    and stoppeth the spinner's cunning.
    Corpses are set to banquet
    at behest of FUTURA. ***

Each time he lost, he laughed it off with all 
the confidence of one with little evidence. So weak
was it in fact that he would laugh again and sing 
the mantra that was going round the bank: 
What you see is all there is! Why should 
he ask for more? Intuitive predictions had got 
him where he'd been. He would be there again.

    So if there's nothing in the whole of this,**
    nothing that is quite my own, 
    still this is me, he told himself.

No matter what you're down you double up next time
around -- and add a constant for your profit said
the small part for his brain, now helplessly
intoxicated by thoughts of wealth to come, I only
need to get it right the once> Come join me -- and play on!
...........................................................

* and ** are (slightly) modified quotes from Ezra Pound's Portrait d'une Femme . *** is a passage from Canto XLV. Here "FUTURA" is my word. Pound's was USURA, from usury, meaning the charging of exorbitant interest.

Written for dVerse Poets: Meeting the Bar for which Anna Montgomery has set us to write on Postmodern (High and Low Art)