Monday, July 31, 2017

Crayola Payola


They’d be very well paid, they were told, if they came out
arrayed in Crayola. Five dollars and forty nine cents for a box
of ten markers – about the same price as a single purveyor
of classier ink that you get from the clique at Chartpak. They
were promised a claque of adoring new fans and appearances at

all the trendiest clubs on the planet, expensively framed in a swirl
of acclaim, with the fame of Merle Oberon at her most famous.
Now they’re here in immoderate glare on the wall of a men’s room
in back of a stall in a bar no one goes to who doesn’t get drunk.
So far they’ve achieved the response of a half-conscious stare

here and there. But they’re not in a funk. They know they’re
supposed to bemoan what they’ve done: sold their souls
to Crayola for nada. But Holy Kenyatta, they love being cheap!
They’d rather be shallow than deep. And they’re having great fun
posing elegantly like Faye Dunaway, making a run of it anyway.




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