Oh, yeah.
So this is a poem about money.
We were talking yesterday a lot about politics
and social life and the culture that we live in.
I was thinking how important it is not
to think that you are outside of all
that but to understand how much a part of it all of you are.
I am.
Let me speak personally.
This poem's called "The Same Bourgeois Magic Wherever
the Mail Train Sets You Down."
It's a line from a poem by Rimbaud.
"It's nice-- money.
Don't tell me it isn't.
To have it, to know that you have it and can get more--
it's the same for all of us.
I'm no exception.
And this is not about psychosocial critiques,
chaste non-attachment, notions that money
is a tamed slavery and chase to touch an elusive amnesia.
You don't like to shove a hand in your pants pocket
and feel the cash there?
Well-laundered, no doubt.
Don't tell me that a billfold in a dark pocket
takes the shape of a trapdoor.
Or that when tendered too freely the face on every ten dollar
bill, Alexander Hamilton, the cabalist and duel fighter,
look sorrier than the skulls that
were strapped with thongs of greased leather
to the prows of Viking longboats.
Money is important.
Don't say people are troubled by matter forever, really.
Don't go on about how after the first funeral,
there seems to be only unfinishedness for all
those aquaculture engineers, Panamanian waitresses,
and bail bondsmen.
So many mail trains never to arrive
because of the foaming action in a failed immune system.
Everyone feels that.
Everyone understands that somewhere, a boy of 14
is out riding his bike, wheeling around his friends,
shouting, hey!
Know what?
I got expelled, you know.
I just got expelled."
I actually did hear--
I mean, that is not something invented.
That is something that I heard on that street
that I walked down to get my daughter.