Friday, November 2, 2007

Hail Ersatziana!




Of the rhinestone-skull and dragon-buckle
wholesale glitzy gewgaw section in New York –
Thirty-second Street down to, say, Twenty-seventh
off Sixth Avenue – it would be churlish and too

easy to lambaste its stuff as cheap and sleazy:
surely less a matter of bad taste than human
profligacy – reveling in the ebullient bounding waste
of paste tiaras and snake-bracelets – expertly

refined, inclined to draw to it – engage –
the fairy-tale consuming mind: merchandised
prodigiously on witches’ wings. Who buys these
things? I think I know: galleons of lost craven souls

adrift and rocking in a sun-less hell below whose
main absorbing entertainments flow and swell
from watching trinkets glitter in the glow of Hades’
searing flash. Ersatziana is the devil’s cash.

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