I.O.U

There's a line for lottery tickets today.
I stare at the back of a line of heads
and wonder how much they would give
for a winner,
how they'd use their billion-dollar fix.

The man in front twists
his niccotine fingers and mumbles
his lucky numbers,
a six-digit prayer to such
unholy saints,
those paper-green faces.

You have a better chance of
being struck by lightning than you do
breaking out of debt before
you're forty--
If my parents wouldn't suffer for
my monetary sins,
my negative worth in the eyes
of capital gods,
I would stand in thundering fields
with my kite to the cumulonimbus.

I am banking
on a set of asinine numbers,
asking Jesus, Mary, every canonized soul
to put me before the others
with crumpled dreams in their pockets,
paying a dollar-and-fifty for what could be
their salvation.

I don't even know their stories,
I just hold mine to my chest and pray
it is enough to justify
the sating of my deficit
before theirs.