poem
Volume 27, Number 1

Money

Money doesn’t just talk,
it shouts, it rants.
It wants its opinion
heard over and over
the airwaves.

Money votes:
one dollar, one vote.

If it can’t pay you to keep quiet,
it will pay someone else
to shut you up.

Money carries a gun
and doesn’t bother to conceal it.

It obeys no laws
but gravity:
large masses of it attracting
more and more.

Little pieces of it falling
into big piles
like hardware store owners
falling into their new careers
at Home Depot.

first appeared in the chapbook Who Are We Then? (Partisan Press, 2013)


—Ed Werstein