April is Poetry Month, so every Sunday this month we will be featuring a poem about crime from Gerald So's 5-2 blog. This week's poem is called Confidence Man and is written by Peter M. Gordon.
CONFIDENCE MAN
I met Bill in a bar on the lower East Side.
He liked to drink and I liked to listen.
After one martini Bill shared his secret:
"Always tell the mark what he wants to hear."
Bill made good money on the grift, as he
liked to call it. Now in his sixties, hands
no longer steady enough to deal off the
bottom of the deck or switch two-dollar
bills with twenties, he reminisced about
how he roped marks like a rodeo champ.
Ponzi schemes, wire cons, badger games,
the Iraqi dinar, the Spanish Prisoner.
He played them all in his heyday. Lived
high. When drunk, Bill could still give a
cold reading to raise the hair on your
neck. I wondered why such an artist
sat on a stool night after night swapping
stories, caging free drinks. After I paid the
tab Bill snapped, "Give me a fin."
I passed him a fiver. "Come back
tomorrow," Bill said. "I’ll bilk you again."
Here is the author reading his poem:
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