RHYMED CONVERSATION WITH MONEY
How many planets have you raped,
Where only animals escaped
To scrape with melancholy needs
The bones of last men lost in weeds?
Since you are blunt and fraudulent
You must receive a bare treatment.
Adverbs and adjectives undress
When greeted by excrescences.
You are the stench on any street,
Thick with the vagaries of defeat:
The wench who plies her squawking crime
Within the alley-ways of time.
For men desire to guard with pain
The limitations of their brain,
And drag the numbness of their hearts
Within ornate and creaking carts.
And for these tasks they must be bold,
Clutching endurance from a cold
Squirming with you within the dark,
And rising blistered with your mark.
Again you give to doubting lust
An argument which it can trust.
Imagination spoils the scene
And needs a dagger, crude and mean.
For you were made by men to choke
A lyric with an obscene joke
And strike the mind when it is strong,
With whips methodical and long.
Men who are inarticulate
Desire to parody their fate
With gibberish of clinking coins.
When life, excited thief, purloins
They lead him to a mouldy pen:
They seek revenge and watch him wilt,
Finding importance in his guilt.
They do not know that they have made
The thief to revel in his aid.
And you are there to strain your cheek
Against imaginations weak—
Coquettish counterfeit of strength.
I have observed your metal length
Of hands drop on the poet’s throat,
And yet he scarcely saw you gloat.
To certain men you merely feed
The stoics of creative need.
Money
I am the vicious test with which
Men find that they are poor or rich.
Without my challenge men might fail
To leave the blurred and murderous jail.
Utopias are merely death:
Men need the scorching of my breath.