Robert M. Simmons  

from Added Entries (Poems 1991- )

        A Dip in the Dow

While driving home

through an autumn haze

in my vintage Volvo

that had seen better days,

wearing a blue blazer

with brass buttons three

and penny loafers

from the previous century,

the news on the radio

was depressing indeed—

the market was falling

at breathtaking speed.

I rushed from the car

to my modest Queen Anne,

deploring what Mammon

was doing to man.

Sipping some Harvey’s

from a crystal glass,

wishing this annoyance

would quickly pass,

sustained by a chair

with the mark of Stickley,

my portfolio shrinking

ever so quickly,

Schubert’s Nocturne in E Flat

belying my fate

as the sun slowly set

on my humble estate,

the fantasy fading

that I could hide

from the tribes of time

circling outside,

the stock market tumbled

as stock markets will,

while my shabby gentility

became shabbier still,

and in the spreading gloom

the world I once knew

appeared infinitely brighter

as it passed from view.

                 © 2003 by Robert M. Simmons

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Subjects: poems about, stock market decline, stock market crash, corporate greed, poetry, poems

A Dip in the Dow