The Last Poster of the
Where have all the
Those tawdry intimations of eternal spring –
Those pastel promises of greenbacks,
Flush, like three-dollar Bills on
Tanner and Stone’s latest masterpieces
Of architectural pornography?
Like birds of paradise perched on telephone wires
In a world of carcinogenic cell phones,
The posters sat in almost every window
In downtown
In banks that mix business with politics,
Signs of the age of promiscuous credit carding.
In FOR RENT store-fronts galore, the posters implied
They would do what a thirty-eight million dollar
Bridge To Nowhere had failed to do: bring back the past,
Bring back the bustling Saturdays on
Bring back the crowds of shoppers and bar hoppers,
Bring back the necking in the
Bring back youth, innocence and lost hair,
Bring back the exhilaration of the 1940s,
The elixir of youth, the gartered ladies and gents,
Bring back the Breck Girl and “A Little Dab’ll do ya,”
“Tuxedo Junction,” “Moonlight Serenade,” “In the Mood”
To offset the nightmare of Dubya Dubya Dubya,
Mortgage brokers and Free Market Fundamentalists,
The machinations of the Marting Foundation –
The lies, the lies, the lies of the Progress Portsmouth Committee!
The news in the Portsmouth Daily Times,
More slanted than an Olympic ski jump,
The spirit of
And then the citizens rose up, on
Like angry peasants, and drove a democratic stake
Through the heart of the unrenovated monster,
The leaking department store, the running sore:
“Good Things are Not Sold Here!” “In S.O.G.P. We Trust!”
Bauer, Kalb, Baughman, don’t forget Marty Mohr.
So hurry down to the Marting store
If you want to see the Last Poster of the
Before that blasted building bites the dust,
Because, as Mohr said, “It ain’t worth anything.”
How much is that doggone poster in the window?
