In a Montgomery Bar Room

Cole Depuy

Now here’s the plan,
ya dumb shit. I heard them
stock rates from Chicago
to Manhattan take 8.5 fuckin’
millerseconds now-a-days
just to zip through the air.
Shooooo and its done.
Bada-bing-bada-boom, ya hear?
So I got to thinkin’.
When oil prices rise in Chi Town...
Them fuckin’ Exxon stocks rise
in New York just 8.5 millerseconds later!
You see what I’m sayin’,
ya thick bastard? Now, listen here.
We gotta build a tower,
tallest sum bitch ya ever saw.
A fuckin’ giant, barbed wire, copters,
the whole nine.
That way — now hear me out—
our signal’ll take just 8.4
and like a bitch it’ll ‘cross Lake Eire
0.1 before the others arrive,
givin’ us a good millersecond ‘er some shit
to sit pretty ‘n hold our peckers!
Ya see? — Oh boy! — when our signal
gets there nice ’n early we
can buy ‘n sell shit ‘fore the prices
drop ‘n what not. We’ll even get computers
to do the math, I reckon. We’re talkin’
time travel here, brother. Time travel.
Sellin’ the goddamn future
to the goddamn past. Wuddya say?

Cole Depuy is a second-year MFA candidate at Southern CT State University in New Haven. He grew up in Newtown, CT and enjoys being a teacher assistant in undergraduate poetry courses and working on research with the SCSU Social Work department.