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Croesus in the Comment Box

(a companion to “Poems for Money…”)

Croesus, old coin‑king,
you sit in my comment box
polishing your metaphors in gold leaf,
telling me the platform fee is “just the cost of doing art.”

But I’ve seen the gates,
how they swing only for those
with a credit card in the lock.
I’ve heard the hallow of poems
that never make it past the paywall,
their syllables still warm in the mouths
of poets who can’t afford
to spit them into the feed.

You say, “What’s a few coins for immortality?”
I say, “What’s immortality to the unheard?”
In Lagos, in La Paz, in Lahore,
there are verses that could split the sky,
but the sky here takes payment in advance.

Croesus, you measure worth in minted weight;
I measure it in the tremor of a line
that makes a stranger’s chest ache.
Your treasury is full,
but my currency is breath —
and breath should not be billed.

Still, I post what I can,
slipping lines through the cracks
between your gold‑plated rules,
hoping one will land in a reader’s hands
like contraband joy.

And if you ask me again
why I won’t pay to be heard,
I’ll tell you this:
because the richest poem I know
was written in the dust,
read aloud to the wind,
and carried farther than your coins could ever reach.

The Archive Wing

The door is oak,
its brass plate worn to a soft blur
by decades of palms.
Inside, the air holds
the dry perfume of paper and cloth,
a faint trace of polish on the banisters.

Shelves rise like terraces,
each step a year,
each row a street in the city’s past.
Ledgers with spines like brick courses
stand shoulder to shoulder,
their titles lettered in gilt
that catches the afternoon light.

A clerk in a grey waistcoat
moves along the gallery,
his pencil ticking in the margin
of a bound minute book.
Below, a student copies
a map of the tramlines
into a ruled notebook —
ink pooling in the loops of her script.

Here, the city keeps
its own autobiography:
births and bankruptcies,
contracts and commemorations,
all pressed flat between covers.
The silence is not absence,
but the pause between sentences
in a paragraph still being written.

.

Homestead Knights

(for Arthur and Kay, before the Stone)

In the paddock’s dawn‑mist,
we joust with broom‑handles,
helmets dented from
last winter’s wood‑pile war.

Kay swears his steed
is faster than mine —
though both are milk‑cart ponies
with hay in their manes
and the patience of saints.

Our shields are feed‑bin lids,
our gauntlets, mother’s old mittens;
we ride the fence‑line
as if it were the edge of the realm.

Between chores,
we patrol the creek ford,
banish thistles from the path,
and guard the henhouse
from foxes real and imagined.

At night,
we sit on the porch steps,
boots steaming in the cool,
and plan the next day’s campaign —
whether to conquer the far paddock
or finally dare the dark of the shed.  

 Somewhere beyond the hill,

a stone waits in its clearing,
but for now
the kingdom is here:
two knights of the homestead,
sworn to the crown
of the rising sun.

.