Dollars and Poems

I'm getting ready to dig into a box of poetry manuscripts into which I haven't dug for at least three years. Yesterday I texted Son #1 and asked him to rummage through a certain stack of boxes at the Brandon Street house to try and locate said box. There ensued a back-and-forth texting marathon as follows: 1) did you find box? 2) can you deliver it to my work? 3) can you leave it on the porch? 4) etc. (Rumor has it that the iPhone 4 can be used to make actual telephone calls, but DON'T BELIEVE IT FOR A SECOND.)

Son #2 delivered box to my workplace as I was sitting on the porch, shivering, in what I thought, mistakenly, would be warm late-afternoon sun. (A long conversation -- off the clock -- with a re-fi banker. Altogether too much information to learn that I Do Not Qualify even though I Already Make The Monthly Payments.) (When I was seventeen I would have qualified because I was the star sprinter on my high-school track team and I qualified for everything and then some.) (And while in the midst of this banking conversation, Son #2 not only delivered The Box but showed me the paint color he picked out for the new bedroom he's framing up in the basement. I disapproved! Pale blue: too dead. I told him to go back and get something warm and creamy, but he told me he'd already purchased (on my dime) the paint. All the while Mr. Banker is rattling on and on about underwriting and lender fees and points. And inside, at work, the paint is drying on a large-fishbowl-black-branches.)

How can I not qualify when I make the damned payments every single month and my credit score places me in a place above where the archangels of the credit-universe live?

My fear here is that the contents of the above-mentioned-box will be fuel for a fire, any fire, the bigger the better. I knew a poet in grad school who said that she regularly stoked the burn pile in her parents' back yard with poetry manuscripts.

Poetry. Mortgages. They want MORE of my money and I have less to give them.

Poetry always wants, demands, more and more again.
And I give it.
How could I do anything else?

This is certain: it's never dull.