GOOD AS GOLD….

….or bad as?
See the couture dames, slick-suited and be-ringed
having no clue where the stuff hails from:
used to and adept at talking in euphemisms
where everyone’s price
is nonchalantly astronomical
and discreetly unmentionable.

It is Everymans money that is dirty,
in such demeaning amounts:
distasteful and plebeian to look at bills, count pennies, know amounts
let alone find out how it is produced.

The oldest treasure and trade of all,
Is found in easy lumps in the desert sands, in sassy veins in secret caves
or running prettily down mountain streams.
Where did Jason get his Golden Fleece or the Israelites, their idolatrous calf?
Why did the Californians Rush and Midas turn food to gold?
While Smaug gloats on his dragon-hoard
Shylock and Scrooge amass the prize
for pirates, highwaymen and bandits, medieval and modern.

Kings ransoms, Holy grails, Druid stashes
and buried ingots, chariots, mummies, shields and coins,
vaults bulging under Swiss streets,
dramatic heists and even bitcoins turned to gold.
Alchemists epic quests,
mountains of gold teeth from Auschwitz ovens.

For every grain of gold extracted
the cost is toxic mountains of sludge
and radioactive waste seeping into the groundwater:
diets of heavy metals and lungs full of lead
is not a matter to consider;
nor the livestock blinded and bleeding
to death,
the babies sick, deformed and dying.
Surely, that’s an alarmists Chernobyl disaster scenario;
(haven’t they put a neat lid on that - for a hundred years at least)
nothing to do with this,
this natural, normal, necessary process
of purifying gold.

Gold - liquid sunlight,
the purest thing of all.
born in the heart’s core of our solar star!
Incorruptible, elixir of the gods,
the essential accoutrements to all things royal - rich and rare.
What self-respecting oligarch, potentate or tycoon
could face the world or her/himself
without a crown, fat trunks of bullion, golden seals, and 24 karat appurtenances.

So those dames and the wheelers and dealers behind them are nothing new.
Just go-betweeners and horse-traders,
purveyors of the consumer substitute for immortality, no less.
Only the Inca gave it no material worth, but saw it sacrosanct:

So how come this filthy dross comes out of purifying the absolutely pure?
How come, it requires arsenic, cyanide and mercury to separate it from the rest
and, as a bonus, sets uranium free?
As well as slave labour - which has no price and needs no consideration -
and its unseen collateral costs and long-term consequences?

Immediate profits and investment opportunities
along with greed and vain glamour
win the day.
That poor dame, decked in her subservient finery
tells the tale.