Who Isn't Selling
Money is a sort of poetry, both
are barely human. And their hypo-
thetical exchange breeds
in me such an unknown
currency I begin
to grunt all animal, my value
rabid on the flux
of loss, stagnation, bitter fruit.
When I think about bitcoin—
I mean, spacetime, I think of the unmet
logic of its gesture, each must
extend to the outer moons
of grief. I keep accounts
of lamentation. I lick a balance
out of grief. I calculate returns on gravity
in living. Orbit those desperate
minor planets until I think
myself back into
an alchemy. Yet at every day
break I see there's so much
money, shit I mean, there's so
much light in its newness.
And Meanwhile, I Fucked Strangers
on Tuesday afternoons, in light in-
consolable with television, weed our eyes
bored into the other’s slacker
dilations. I was a trash person, I lived
in trash. I was only a woman
in public. I biked to seaside
and sat in trash, spelled out in trash I wish
this were a better
poem and more words, too, but seagulls
carried them away and built
a city. Named it Manhattan. A mis-
translation, we were in Queens.
I envied their ambitions, mine
on thin reserve, mostly borrowed
from a friend though I sold my time
in dollar slices. Tell me
you’re a whore, one stranger said, trying
his limits in less
than feeling. Artaud wrote that words
are only halfway to
intelligence but please insert
them in me anyway, I want to know
what poetry is, besides funded
by low-rate retirement complexes. Besides
sewn from other peoples’
hours. Besides poor Echo
in her cave of self-
satisfaction. Three months ago
I had no interests, it was bliss
enough to make
my bed from. Thought I was
beyond all this, yet here
I am again
hardwired in these poses.
