The phone will ring its last ring –
the sound of the angry man
come to claim what is now his.
Trinkets will slip from my ears,
teeth fall rotten from my mouth.
My body will sag and hunch.
One by one, the lights
in my house will go out –
fireflies eaten by a black bird.
In the meantime, I pay the bills
and fix the broken things
and throw the unfixable.
I change the tyres and the oil
and drive through the town
like I still have somewhere to go.
But a figure moves towards me
who knows what lies in the land
where coins have no meaning.
She comes to greet me from far away.
She will speak of a feast beyond
appetite, a beauty beyond forms.
On the day the last coin drops
from my hand, we will meet.
We will meet in the centre of the road.
We will meet in the abandoned market.
We will meet in the alley
where dumpsters rule like fat kings.
The NaPoWriMo prompt for today is to write a poem about money: Wallace Stevens famously wrote that “money is a kind of poetry.” So today, I challenge you to write about money! It could be about not having enough, having too much (a nice kind of problem to have), the smell, or feel, or sensory aspects of money. It could also just be a poem about how we decide what has value or worth.
