Life is
*******
Expensive.
There's phone bills
Water bills
Transit books soap netflix toothpaste food rent
To buy
And it's a lot more
Than I was ever
Prepared for.

I always thought art had to be hard.
There had to be some deep inner struggle, some magical spiritual resonance
That gave art meaning

I thought love was about pomp and circumstance
That it had to be verbose, brash
I pined and flirted and thought I knew love
I knew nothing

I haven't changed much
I am a different shape but the same shade
I've found art in puddles, and love in myself
But I'm still learning
I'm sure I'll still write poetry
That's pompous and shallow
But now I'll know a little but more
About the pieces of myself

And maybe one day I'll figure out who I will be.

I walk past the poor every day
The ones that ask me for money
For the change
That I hear jangling in my ears long after I walk away
Money comes to me like a slip of paper
A white page
Stateing times and dates and hours spent
In the pursuit of happiness
Because that's how I feel when I get my wage
Like the hours I spent didn’t just waste away.
The jingle of my work, my age
Is what I pour into that man’s cup
It might be fifty cents
But it’s really six minutes
It might be six minutes
But it’s part of what I earned with my time.
Money is a sense of safety
A paper cushion
In my back pocket
That protects me from them.
A buffer of light green
Silver, copper, gold
That speaks of books
And travel
And new worlds
So I pour my dreams into that man's cup.
Maybe I can share my dream with him
Maybe the money
Will help him
In a way that it helps me
Maybe he will feel safer, warmer,  happier
With my hopes jangling in his pocket.
It may be fifty cents.
But it was still money
My money
That isn’t gaining me anything
Except a lightness in my pocket
And a quiet evaluation of where it can take me.
Money controls me
Just as much as I control it.
As I tip the coins
As they fall
I can hear them
They keep me going for another six minutes, then another six, then another.
That fifty cents,
Screams at me
Power, effort, time.
I want to think that money is good
That the people who get it are
But I see how I spend
How he spends
How she spends
And I think that the dreams that money whispers are for adults
And maybe I have to truly be an adult to know
That it’s not what my money does to me, but what I do
To those without.
My coins get caressed in his hands
***** in a  way
That’s so  different than mine
God bless
He whispers, and I think of the coins
That have that
Exact
phrase stamped on them.
Money should be used in Thomas Jefferson’s say:
To promote happiness in a responsible way
Because the tail of the devil must be dipped in the stuff
The economics of everyday making decisions tough
I can feel the relief it gives me to part with the money
But I calculate the loss
The casual toss
Of the money,
The money
That represents so much
Good
And so much hope.

Release me from the present
so i can jump
full stop
into the future
even if it scares me
at least
it's better than this
unbalanced
equilibrium

Once upon a time
Lived a boy drenched in reason and rhyme
He culled the fields
A plow he yields
With a smile as soft as soil

But he heard the call to better things
away to rocks and stones that sing
Buried down in dirt and dust
Yields a bite of metal's rust
A smile as sharp as flint

The hand of death touched his soil
But through that barrage he twisted and toiled
But as he pleaded an escape from the grip of black
He knew that it would pull him back
And a set as solid as stone

Back to farm and yield he traveled
To see he life had unraveled
His green fields of corn and roan
Was all dark, and filled with stone
The green boy shadow stained

The boy had twisted and shouted
That the shadow of death should let him out
But in his haste to escape
He forgot the trace of blood and the deeper scrape
That was gunpowder and blood

He forgot to ask
He forgot the tasks
That had given him a soil smile
And in that lost guile
He forgot to ask the hand that gripped him
To wash itself of the shadow
Of blood and gunpowder

we talked once
through stalks of paper
book of trees
we glimpsed
pieces of hands
souls, eyes
as the books wavered and shook
in the still earthquake
of paper between us