The Bottom Line
“Enough,” he said, “is enough.”
And all the receipts fell from the trees
And a billion billion bills came due
And what we wore grew dingy on our knees
And our buttons dropped to the floor
Among the toys
Among the cracked temporary necessities
Among the miserably high-priced shoes–
And yes, stupidly, the socks–
And the shocking electronic boxes of lights
And the noise
And the music music music that had turned to noise.
And he didn’t need to say it again
But he did: “Enough!
It’s enough.”
And he tore out his tubes
Because
From mountains of things
To oceans of things
To prairies of anything,
Nothing grew–it only
Accumulated.
And your hands
Were in my family’s pockets
Taking more than our dirty little change
(But not much more),
Leaving leafless our accounts
And our few hours empty
Of anything approaching an eleemosynary twinkle.
And so our smiles, like yours, became just teeth,
And we all bit:
On the red want,
On the white wish,
And on the wild blue greed.
During his 21 years in Memphis from 1971 to 1992, Ed Weathers was at various times instructor of English at the University of Memphis, editor of Memphis magazine, and associate editor of The Memphis Flyer. He moved to Connecticut in 1992 to work for the New York Times Magazine Group. He has published poems in a wide variety of small literary magazines. He now resides in Norwalk, CT, where he writes and teaches. His email address is ed@edweathers.com.
If you would like to submit a poem of any length, style, or level of experimentation to be considered for Diptera, please send your poem/s, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope to Diptera, Attn: Lesha Hurliman, 460 Tennessee Street, Suite 200, Memphis, TN 38103. Electronic submissions should be sent to lhurliman@memphisflyer.com. Please include a short bio. Submissions are not limited to Memphis residents.
Diptera is not an online literary journal but something more like a bulletin board, and therefore the author retains all rights to the poetry published on Diptera. The poems published on this site can be submitted to any journal without our notification, and we do accept poems that have been previously published as long as we are given a means of obtaining permission to post them.
\Dip”te*ra\– An extensive order of insects having only two functional wings and two balancers, as the house fly, mosquito, etc. They have a suctorial proboscis, often including two pairs of sharp organs (mandibles and maxill[ae]) with which they pierce the skin of animals. They undergo a complete metamorphosis, their larv[ae] (called maggots) being usually with
