There are several theories that attempt to explain the invention of money. And all of them are dipped in blood. The one that makes the most sense is tied to debt, that money was invented to track the movement of goods between men. A man gives another man a horse and in exchange some kind of paper. Aristotle says every object has two functions: the value for which it was originally designed and the value it has when traded.
There are many theories that attempt to explain the invention of written language. And to me the one that makes the most sense is tied to debt, is dipped in blood. A man gives another man a horse and there it is, alive in ink, on paper, as a metaphor he can fold and keep in his pocket.
I have many theories that attempt to explain the invention of arts grants and all of them are tied to debt, tied to the guilt a country inherits trying to make good on its history of pillage, tied to facing the impossible horror of its own wealth. A man takes a country and its people and its money and expects to be forgiven without giving up shit. And here we are having to exist in the yuck of it in a world that does not know how to assign a poem its proper horse.
I’ve done all kinds of things for money. Sold coffee, guarded a fence, taught scansion, and there was this once I sucked dick for 60 dollars. I was trying to get to Houston to read poems in the basement of a pump-house for an even smaller amount of money. A mouth has two functions: the purpose for which it was originally designed and the value it has when traded. Thus, his hips bucked once and suddenly, a full tank of gas. My pockets alive with animals. A metaphor for horsepower.
Later, I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (including a collection of poems about sucking that dick), and suddenly the value of my mouth exploded. Hosanna! My currency multiplied. Now a government-approved throat. In that same packet, though—in that same packet, though—an elegy for my dead ex-boyfriend, even though he hated me; still I made his body alive again on paper, made it dance for coins, traded his body for sandwiches, for rent. I’ve got a government-approved sadness; I’ve got a government-approved debt; I’ve got a government who wants my loved ones filled with bullets, filling prisons; it’s sick how money is always disturbing the dead, always making us declare our lives against the price of oil but still you gotta pay to live. My family had to pay to be smuggled out from the burning charnel house of Russia, and this is how I’m here. A man gives another man a horse and gallops the fuck away.
There’s an alternative theory of language that suggests it was invented to touch the ineffable, approach God, give shape to what, by its nature, is priceless—you, alive in my arms again, all my family, blood or otherwise, around the same table; good, clean water. Every poem I have ever written is trying to get closer to the people I have lost—and is failing.
—A spoken-word performance at the 2017 Rustbelt Poetry Festival, posted to Button Poetry (6 September 2017); text appears here with poet’s permission.
Bio: sam sax
