National Poetry Month: Two Poems

debt ritual: statement
(w/ debt owed to Travis)

so that the sounds of daily living
become a part of the ritual
as public as private as life
but also so that when I 
sit in the dark on the couch
paying the bills my face
illuminated by the screen
so too is your face illuminated
on your couch by your screen
and every other household
nearly so that my exceptional
shame becomes exceptionally
ordinary and I might
begin to feel my place
in the order of money
in relation to everyone
else’s balance: we must be
too big to have failed

***

debt ritual: write
(w/ debt owed to Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life & Marina who gave me her copy of it)

in place of disclosure
I offer a rite
a symbol of the specific
not April’s dinner overwritten
as debt on June’s statement
so that what I eat is not
my future money
a scarce sacrament
not a number
but the word 
corresponding to the collective
idea of a lemon
a fish and herbs
in all their effervescence
if I say I want 
a collective life
and the specificity
of my own sense
I take what I know
as though I am
stupid and try
not to understand 
what it wants me to 
understand I could 
explain if I could
what is perceived 
but not by the sense
is inarticulable
without a symbol
“vibrating sympathetically
in accord with
an internal law”
if I say public
life and assume
capital
money’s dark
totem or 
money’s occult
debt why not
then dissolve its science
with rite call darkness
to darkness over money
to money disorder
the order and order
it again dissolute
poet insolvent scholar
effervesce! effervesce!
what other thought
what other collective
what same world 
and different idea of it
what efficacy 
of spontaneous feeling
become self-conscious +
with luck collective
as a name
I did not have money
I gave my word