Money is the most boring thing in the world, like breathing
it’s annoying when you’re forced to think about it 

or it feels impossible, somehow, that you just continue
regulating these flows or you die. I dug up a snail shell 

& it was impossible for my naked eye to tell if its inhabitant had died
beforehand or if my shovel killed it, if I killed it with my shovel to be 

more precise, I feel a bit American writing this 
in the vanishing hours of the Fourth of July, entering the great 

U.S.A. tradition of debating whether actions can be attributed
to objects (shovels don’t kill snails, people 

do), whether corporations can rightly be understood 
as people, my LLC was depressed and died by messy suicide so 

their dependent only gets the money paid directly into
their life insurance policy, nothing like the million dollars 

the coverage otherwise would have entitled them to, a little
pasture of capital with a few goats to keep things trim 

& in milk. Honey, your body is floating down the river, did you want
to attach a mind? Robert Lowell calls Rimbaud’s soldier 

a “conscript” in his rendition of “Le dormeur du val” and I promise
I am not offering you this as some disconnected literary

detail, I think the deux trous rouges have everything to do 
with capital’s vampire bite and all it sucks out of each of us, 

our feet in the gladioli and our hands busy refreshing 
the makeup we’ve applied to the corpses of our lives, dead somewhere 

between childhood and young-adulthood at the moment 
when we had to take debt’s bullet in our teeth 

& bite down. From that point on it’s just uphill bleeding 
or it feels impossible, somehow, that you just continue 

without knowing what your name means, without responding 
appropriately to all correspondence heretofore received, 

Thank you so much for your kind message. All the best, 
in 2016 the Bethlehem Steel Mill caught fire in (no way) 

Lackawanna, New York, all the reports say a fire broke out 
but broke in feels more right, the air gone anhedonically into one big smoke cloud 

which has become the norm now, no? I can joke about this 
because no one died in the Bethlehem fire, though the one person 

injured might have some notes, and of course a poet 
of a certain race & gender giving himself permission to make 

“jokes” is a bit American, too, or at least the getting 
away scot-free with it is, I’ve never paid tax on a joke 

but I have on getting paid for a poem & on income from both my jobs
(“jobs” just a couple small transpositions from “joke,” 

it’s a theorem you prove somewhere in discrete math 
that any permutation can be paraphrased as a composition 

of transpositions, in other words we can build up 
large derangements out of tiny ones, just switches, really, 

like on a philosophy trolley. From these little decisions
all disorder is born). Earlier I demurred from responding in a Twitter 

thread about what poetry books should do; I almost said
my favorite poetry books are the ones that show 

the reader some rough waters, but also carry them through
the building of a (possibly quite provisional) kind of craft 

from within which reader & poet alike can survive the roil,
find Fiona Apple’s calm atop the surf rather than under 

the waves, I don’t know, I didn’t post it because it felt hokey
or too metaphorical to be connected to the actual mechanics 

of a book. The air here 
is a century long, which is not very long 

for air. I still haven’t checked Meat Air, the Ron Loewinsohn book
for that poem Jordan mentioned about the swimmers; 

I should. I will. I fell off my horse and landed in the mud
on the side of the king’s road to being a human person 

and now you are looking at me, or feeling for me, it feels like pity
or it feels impossible, somehow, that you just continue 

in your carriage on the dusty path into town that leads 
eventually to the palace, Grace 

Zabriskie giving you cryptic hints how to get there but not
the password you end up needing at the gate, the clue 

you set up for yourself a lifetime ago was meant as a little joke, a knowing
nod, but you’ve forgotten the context and all you have 

is an imm(ai)nent need to get to the other side, like someone dying
or a chicken in a different joke, one you get & could tell 

was coming, a shipping crate full of joke books on fire 
but the discard reason is listed as “water damage” anyway

& the nearby sea air is filled with the laughter of ashes
“swimming off to Catalina”