I can hear little snaps from the--
Yeah, that's cool, like a little patter--
pitter-patter is nice.
OK, I'll read just one more from this one.
And then I'll move on to the new book.
Do we all know what cryptocurrency is?
That's a hard swerve, we didn't know we were going there.
Yeah, Bitcoin, cool.
I went through a bad breakup--
I moved to San Francisco, and then went
through a bad breakup immediately--
very convenient timing.
And I ended up sleeping on my friend's porch for a while,
and that friend was really into cryptocurrency and had just
gotten a job with-- this was the early days,
basically no one knew what it was--
and it turns out he worked--
he was the first employee for Coinbase.
Do you know what that is?
It's like-- I don't even know how to describe it--
but it's one of the big companies.
Anyway, he was kind of a dirt bag--
just, I love you, all of you are great--
no, no, at the time, he was living
with seven other friends, and he was the younger brother of one
of my best friends, and he happened
to live in San Francisco so he let me sleep on his porch.
And then after maybe five years, he
was on the cover of Forbes magazine.
He was flipping a coin into the camera,
he had like a Wayne Gretzky mullet,
and he was wearing a tux, like a magician,
and he was flipping a coin into the camera.
Which I always thought was so corny, because bitcoins
aren't even real coins, they're just numbers.
Anyway, this poem is about that time in my life,
and it's also--
it contains everything I know to this day about cryptocurrency,
which really isn't very much.
It's called, "Interim"--
On the glassed-in back porch
of a friend's house on Folsom,
I slept three weeks on a heap
of patterned wool blankets,
a large ziploc of granola,
and a jar of pistachios on the sill.
I woke to bus traffic
in the floorboards and sun
on my face, drank thin coffee
and scoured the listings
for a studio someplace more
possible.
Each day nothing
and each day I paced
the bright narrow side streets
with my friend, who was taking
time off and who was an expert
in digital currencies.
I'd tell him about the collapse
of my marriage and he tell me
about the distant servers
that mine electronic coins
by solving complex equations.
Not very helpful.
The specialized equipment required
for this kind of work.
I would ask him
basic questions and he would
answer patiently, the coins are encrypted code.
The code is the currency,
value is determined by the market.
Those days every detail
had the glimmer of potential cruelty.
Hot pink curtain caught in a shut window,
drainpipe signed King baby, in white-out pen,
paper bag of potatoes, rotting
in the trunk of the car I borrowed
to retrieve a crate of books from storage.
I called a man about a place
above a Thai restaurant and lied
about how much I make in a year.
He was from Pittsburgh,
we talked about rain
he said he'd call later to tell me
if I got it.
On another walk,
I asked my friend more questions,
Will it replace cash?
Yes.
Is it untraceable?
Yes.
What happens when they run
out of equations?
A bus hummed past, skimming the branches
of the Ficus tree, giving us shade.
It's not like that, he said.
It could go on forever.
I've really cornered the market on crypto-poems,
nobody's doing it like me.