Money Enough

Money is sexy, it juices us. It represents security and makes the world go around or at least pays the fare and makes music jiggling. Or "It really doesn't matter," as my mother would say, "you should only have your health." I knew then that money was actually in first place....as long I wasn't sick. 

Money means power and privilege to most people. It's the mother of all metaphors yet a taboo word for many poets. The object of derision for artists who live in garrets, wash at the Exxon station and dine at the Automat on hot water and ketchup. Some worship the almighty buck and others romanticize its absence. For me, money is an abstraction until I spend it or don't have any. On the board game of life I'm sailing between Baltic and Mediterranean but docking at Marvin Gardens. The trench coat in the shadows trailing me for sixty years would be a rich man today if he had noted all my buyings and sellings ....and done the opposite. It takes a special skill to have lived in Southern California for the second half of the twentieth century and not made any money. It's like being unable to find a restaurant in San Francisco. I sell before the soufflé rises. A psychologist friend tells me I need to love money more. Regress me, then, to my days as milk monitor when everyone got cookies, coin or no. I'm with the queen eating bread and honey while the others are in the counting house playing with their money. The teacher said to pay attention and my father, in kindergarten, heard it as ,"pay a pencil." When he found out he passed the good news along to me of what is free....pencils and all those other blues and greens. To make of life an art; and when you're spent to know the "voluptuous destitution" of having plenty of nothing; that place where we start and finish and in between it's enough to have just enough.