Rhymed Conversation with Money

/ How many planets have you raped, / Where only animals escaped / To scrape with melancholy needs / The bones of last men lost in weeds? / Since you are blunt and fraudulent / You must receive a bare treatment. / Adverbs and adjectives undress / When greeted by excrescences. / You are the stench on any street, / Thick with the vagaries of defeat: / The wench who plies her squawking crime / Within the alley-ways of time. / For men desire to guard with pain / The limitations of their brain, / And drag the numbness of their hearts / Within ornate and creaking carts. / And for these tasks they must be bold, / Clutching endurance from a cold / Squirming with you within the dark, / And rising blistered with your mark. / Again you give to doubting lust / An argument which it can trust.

/ Imagination spoils the scene / And needs a dagger, crude and mean. / For you were made by men to choke / A lyric with an obscene joke / And strike the mind when it is strong, / With whips methodical and long. / Men who are inarticulate / Desire to parody their fate / With gibberish of clinking coins. / When life, excited thief, purloins / The voice and energy of men, / They lead him to a mouldy pen: / They seek revenge and watch him wilt, / Finding importance in his guilt. / They do not know that they have made / The thief to revel in his aid. / And you are there to strain your cheek / Against imaginations weak -- / Coquettish counterfeit of strength. / I have observed your metal length / Of hands drop on the poet's throat, / And yet he scarcely saw you gloat. / To certain men you merely feed / The stoics of creative need.