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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYC29lbq8SY&ab_channel=Daughter-Topic

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What a profoundly frivolous thing 

Of such a dire importance, and yet treated

By the world at large

With complete, and total irrelevance.

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What a profound, and frivolous thing:

The wallet we all hold

Tucked, tight, into our back pockets -

Into the hidden recesses of our purses.

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We build our entire lives upon its skeleton -

Upon the welded, patch-framework

Of its inherited composition, upon its basis,

Its outcome, its insight and its experience: 

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Youth, childhood, the soft crackling

Of an eggshell

That we don’t even have the foresight

To hold with any kind of value, any sort of esteem

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Until after we’ve broken beyond its surface

And’ve gone, scuttling - open aired

And vulnerable - into all those immersions

That become the enfolding of the sea.

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                To think, when we finally grow old,

                We face ourselves in those mirrors - 

                In the faded photographs

                That almost seem

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                 To completely defy memory.  

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                And then, when we try to match

                What we remember

With the reflection, opposite us,

Refracted in the mirror …

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                 We can’t.

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And are left, instead, with just the wallets, 

Tucked, into the protections of our pockets

And the keep-safes, hidden, 

Behind the tightly buckled belts 

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Of the patterned professionalism

That preserves the treasure, prized,

Behind the pleats in our clothes-hems 

And behind the obstruct leathers of our purses.

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