poem

 Currency

Consider a world where love is a currency.  A means of exchange, to be traded for items or experiences of equivalent value. Or you could simply invest it in arcane financial instruments that earn interest and become a source of passive income.  Ten percent growth year after year without holding a door, remembering a date, tending to anyone ill. Without doing anything at all. A perpetually appreciating asset.  Plenty of people just hoard it.  Store it behind iron clad vaults of impenetrability.  Save it up for down turns, for hard times.  These are the people who never had much of it growing up.  They don’t ever want to feel that way again.  You can understand. So they write poems and watch Terrence Malick films alone. But time elapses and elapses and they start to realize they have so much buried inside and, at some point, have to spend some before they die.  All these Thanksgiving feasts that no one attends.  Such delicious food all gone to waste.  The lucky ones plow through it as fast as it comes in.  They believe it grows on trees. Every fall they dash through yards, joyously laughing, sweeping up piles and piles of yellow and green and purple and red, like so many drachmas and francs and yen.  

9/23/21