My credit card company tried to steal $39 from me today, but I caught them and they're giving it back, which they'll do sometimes if you catch them. But you have to keep your eye out. I've written only one poem I'm immediately aware of that references credit cards, from my manuscript Belief Is Impossible. This poem and many others from the manuscript have been published in magazines but the manuscript itself has never been published:
Between corporate downsizing
and rampant part-time underpayment
a group of people wander, silent
in halls that separate them.
If I wanted to be a hermit
high in the hills above Los Angeles
sooner or later credit companies
would steal the wine from my bamboo hut.
Anybody know any other poems about credit cards? Please send one that you know of, or if you don't know of any, write one yourself and send it to me.
sonnet for a small victory against capitalism
ReplyDeletethere was a period
in my life where i
accepted every credit
card offer i received
in the mail (only
those that charged no
annual fee) in pre-
paration for that day
--should it come to
this--when, having run
them all up, i would
flee to wyoming or
some place and start
myself a new identity.
Identity Theft
ReplyDeleteToday I got my titanium
Visa in the mail.
Not about credit cards, but with a major credit card reference--From Dear [Blank] I Believe in Other Worlds:
ReplyDeleteEverything slides to the side, one stilted to protect from flooding like the jungle, hundreds of distinct languages separated and developing apart from new dirt runways and missionaries. No double bed. Detachment becomes possible even in America where leaving is easy, a life of credit card scams and bad credit is a life of romance, impossible like details. At home, outlined in graphic paste, swimming with groupers, the third largest in the world, in Appalachia. Clicked into dust I’ve learned how to trace, careful of fingers and ears and the folds in clothes. Trace and move, and here we are, smiling.
Denis Johnson has a poem in The Incognito Lounge (don't have it at hand, so not sure the title), that refers to a credit card, a blazing credit card. Pretty damn good. But it's not in any obvious way about credit cards.
ReplyDeleteFirst: Earlier today I read your
ReplyDeleteessays: Emerging Avant Garde Poetries
and the "Post-Language Crisis"
and
On the Lyric As Experimental Possibility
- Thank you for writing them.
-
Have written opinions about credit
but never a credit card poem. Your
invite, however, birthed the
following ditty:
Oh yah! the credit cah!
Credit, credit.
Get it. Dread it.
-
Where the print is fine,
read each line.
-
Welcome aboard,
says your new Lord.
With our credit cards we can afford
ReplyDeleteto spend more,
so the people who sell to us
can charge more.
This ensures a lively
and profitable synergy
between our favorite retailers
and our favorite banks.