by Mark Raffman

“Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX,
was arrested in the Bahamas…”
—The New York Times

The air hung heavy in my cell that night.
At ten, the jailer brought back someone new.
“Come in,” I said. “I promise not to bite—
I’m sleeping off a bender. How ‘bout you?”

“They call me ‘King of Crypto’!” he declared.
“You mine it with computers, then it’s cash.
A fortune made in bits and bytes,” he shared.
“An ironclad investment … til the crash.

“And just like that, the bank accounts were gone.
The house, the yacht, the empire—down the drain.”
They moved him to another cell by dawn,
And I awoke with whiskey on the brain.

“If crypto’s real,” the thought occurred to me,
“Then so are these pink elephants I see.”