Thrift Ticker (What Happens in a Recession Makes You Real Again)

Down the estate sale, refuse rows I walk, where everything smells like a sneeze, and the only things worth my patronage might take weeks to unearth. The hardbacks loom with sky-high tags and gutter-gloom titles; the keystrokes of only the most saturated serial novelists weighing the foreverness of a secondhand shelf to the pompous or the poor (it's tough to tell, most often).
The treasures frown behind a locked glass case, victims of a thoughtless throwaway or desperate pack rat purging. Everything looks sad; everything has a story, a life of its own, a memory shining in the flickering closet dawn of a mind too willing to forget.

The smart trousers ding-dangle on the edge of a clipper hanger, trying to hide in a thicket of slacks, belaboring the grip and tug and pull of another voyeur vagabond to stretch and tease their limits. (The red-stickered sale denims know that the crimson appendage they've been bequeathed spells doom for their waistbands; who wouldn't want size 34 501s for $3?) To be cast aside a second or third time (doomed for the landfill after four) the ultimate fray in a threadbare, boot-cut nightmare ("Those denims have eyes," you think. "Them buttons, they cry and bleed with every pudgy finger smudge.")
All the sad picture frames full of strangers, for the lonely to hang in their homes, creak and splinter, specters staring with lost eyes and yellowed complexion, no smiles, old clothes, marked for death, watching from the cart-clogged aisles their wardrobes fondled. Not one of the bleeding pairs of eyes (no buttons, real eyes) could be attached to someone tall, for no shoe size measured within these walls eclipses 11, and so I go barefoot forever (and secretly believe that having larger feet equals larger heart equals longer life). And every waistband's Humpty Dumpty girth means the appetites of the dead or purging surely beat my own.
Dog-eared hare plush spits an alkaline spark to a crooked 9-volt beat in a sea of toys, twitching a tourette break dance in the company of his inanimate peers, juking semi-circles 'gainst the bargain bin bears and cubs like a meth-head Haight Street panhandler on the make. Twitch, twitch, slide, fidget, futile begs for snooty connoisseurs, their helium heads already cloaked a morbid black within the jaws of the generous equine.
The vases stand full of perfume. The candle's wick hollows half-mast a phallic Virgin Mary. The heroin kid down the turntable aisle neglects to note the irony of lamenting the absence of the needle, and another skims the records for hidden tracks.
Cyclical. Figure-eights. Grooves in the Bread records spiral to the center and stop, and skip, and fuzz-hum to a stuttered thump, like the world outside these walls; like the walls within every wondrous life ping-ponging within my view.