THE PASSION OF THE TOAST

Now let us pray and let us pay
kudos to the new flimflammer champ
of the entrepreneurial universe, you
shrewd epicurean sous-chef to The Big Guy,
you. You, who oleo-margarined cheap white bread
sparingly enough not to tear it,
then experimented with Teflon over gas
flame dialed to high heaven—
for forty days and forty nights, give or take
a fortnight—until the grilled American
partially charred cheese
sandwich harkened its illusion, cast
its spell upon the HOLY MOSES! chosen few
most bamboozleable souls.
                                       Easy to believe
you sold such sacrosanct
folk art on eBay for twenty-eight-smooth-
root-of-all-evil Gs. Hallelujah,
pass the mazuma, and God bless
Brother Rorschach's reverse take on this
perfect Virgin Mary framed—
rather gothically, wouldn't you agree?—
in burnt dough. On the flip side,
I say it's safe to say, isn’t it,
perspective is the devil’s workshop,
vantage point rules the roost, beauty
indeed is in the skewed view
of the beholden, etcetera, yadda-yadda-
yadda, etcetera?
                        In other words,
for my priestly-sober, oxymoronic,
hoaxable simoleons
this golden-brown bleached blonde
resembles more the virginless
Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe
burgeoning from the bread. For her, by God,
I'd have bumped the bid up
to twenty-eight-double-ought-one, got more bang
for my buck, cloned the toasted-cheese
miracle by the millions into a He
Works-In-Mysterious-Ways
line of microwavable airline TV dinners: Try
our new Provolone Monte Cristo
Monroe, our UNlike-a-Virgin Fishstick Madonnas,
and Finger-lickin' Brittany Chicken Spears—
sinfully mortal last meals to be savored
piping hot as are you, spiraling down
in fictional flames while glued
to the latest designer news-
flash from the super-
duper network,
Foxy Babe.