15. "pump and blow gold everywhere"

That money and sex are not so different from one another and also inextricably linked to one another is not an observation unique to poets.  As my distant cousin Lefty Frizzel knew a long time ago and sang: "Money goes from hand to hand, your baby goes from man to man."   Cash money is filthy and you never know who has had their hands on it and where their hands were before you.  My favorite news article lately is how you can catch H1N1 from your money, which was, you know, once someone else's money, too.   And Alli Warren knows what Lefty Frizzel knew: "It's no joke / no one was found alive / with whom they shared / their secret swelling feasting. / All this cash it's form."

Everything's circulation.  Animals herd, people fail to hoard, and poets are a cockfaced opulent mix of colts and 49ers (I mean they are herding animals & they are rushing for gold).  This is circulation: "in the same way as all movement that carries one/ in the direction of the natural is natural."

As Alli writes, -- "Hoes need nectar too."  But I misread it as Hoes need Hector, too -- something heroic -- "a new moleskin" - or maybe I've totally misread it as "poets need Hector, too" (that's my projection, Dear Troy).  All the while our bodies affections & cash collapse:

People win awards.

There is cheese and wheat and eros

for the group

if you are lucky.

It reminds me of Dickinson's poetic economies:

I pay—in Satin Cash—
You did not state—your price—
A Petal, for a Paragraph
It near as I can guess—

When it comes to our poems, so much like money &eros we don't know what we have to debit. Remember Shelia E.? 

She saw him standing in the section marked

If you have to ask you can't afford it lingerie
She threw him bread and said make me scream
In the dark what could he say

I designed the cover for this chapbook out of pictures of Russian revolutionary children I snapped from someone else's computer screen: "hold your jeweled kicks/ up to the pulsing gate/ and say cheese."