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The truth is
money is in war, not poetry.
Money is in real estate and clean water.
Money is in other people’s money.
Not pitted antique linins
with slight stains at the hand stich
Mom swears are worth a lot.

Money is in country, in USA, in Fiction,
in the numbered ether.
Not square nails rusted brittle to the touch
kept in tin cans around the house
for the strange subversive opulence
of one day selling.

Money is not in our wistful, almost-mint antiques.
More critically, it is not in abstinence.
Absorbed by a single cell
when all the mind wants is to indulge—
money is not in not indulging. Not in
the flushed ranks of your crippled piety.

I will miss lush foliage. I will miss
the abundance of summer.
I will miss apples and asters and frogs,
the smell of weed, the acridness of body,
when we drive ourselves out of luck with cars.

Money is an abstract scream, not the silence
that hangs from my head in a broken nimbus.
I light near the edge of what I know, and what I know
is nothing of money, but only of words, of hobby,
of stitching one stained stich after another.

From the torque maw comes some truth.
The wading bird that thinks it can eat the ocean—
our becoming that has gone septic.
Money is in the oasis of the waterless dust.