Nothing can approach the materiality of paper money
Except all the things that can
You love vacations in the world’s out-of-the-way places
As much as you love arguments for philanthropy, overmen and state’s rights
I will, some afternoon,
build you a small trojan horse
in the shape of a microfinanced
sculptural flourish for your
indoor infinity waterfall
professedly made with noble tribe-person’s hands
called Serengeti Serenity
In counterpoint to the crass tastes of the underclass
your jazz hands, subterfuge and legerdemain
sing hosanna to intangible forms
of power bound up in bundles
of information and intellectual assets
creating a ritardando that
signals the distance between
the tastes of slack-jawed worker bees
and the riant virtu and
sheer sexual elan
that results when delicacy
discernment
and physiognomy
are cultivated in clover
You can see all from your eyries in our cities
In this
the best of all possible worlds
you are your best self
poised on a frictionless plane
So you will survive my underhanded attack
smash my fifth columned carving and sell its remains to
enterprising carpenters
as repurposed timber
for chic boutiques
and au courant watering holes
With this supernumerary income
you will laughingly pay the bill
for our furtive lunches
and clandestine hotel rendezvous
(Condiments are sometimes slathered on naked torsos taut with the
aphrodisiac of misalliance)
You refuse to color in the ornate black and white heart
I left for you on the coffee table of your summer house
I wonder when it will turn yellow and curl at its edges
Perimeters of paper have little to do with the flange or periphery of the
Comintern
By virtue of two papers, one on the Third International, the other, its content
cater-cornered, on the materiality of money, touching each other at an angle
of less or more than 90 degrees, their perimeters, bevelled, connect the
present with the temporal distance of March 1919. They brush up against
one another
Much like how sentimentality touches Bauhaus in some impossibly priced
penthouse in Midtown
Bauhaus makes for a rotten dinner (like the dinner I will make for you)
And some other things besides
Like money.
Material money.
Dried honey.
Rot.
Export Processing Zones. Busy worker bees. Angular harmonies. You and
me. Zestfully clean. Unbroken and freshly pressed. Freshly minted and newly
blessed. Full of cub scout relish.
CJH Lewis is a son of western Canada, having grown up in both BC and Alberta. Now, however, he lives in a hut in a gulag of the Creative Industries, a terra incognita that is, to no one's surprise, densely populated. His hut is squeezed between two sublunar peculiarities: the joy of working from home and the danger of clawbacks to workplace benefits and collective bargaining positions.