“How Much Do You Plan to Splurge in the Coming Year?”

by Ace Boggess

Pennies, peanuts, porridge, pick your poison.

If you’ve got money, honey, I’ve got closet space,

cluttered attic, dusty room after dusty room, but

where’s the moolah? I’ll buy you the sun

since you have the moon lamp that hovers &

yellows your nights. I’d buy you a box

of ten thousand tacks to pin my postcards to a wall,

if you had space. I’d buy you space.

I’d buy you the universe if I found it on sale

in the discount bin at a deity store.

It adds up, you know, to something like sweetness,

at least according to Citizen Kane

who, it turns out, just wanted to be loved,

didn’t know how because his mother abandoned him,

left him on the doorstep of a fortune.

CONTRIBUTOR’S STATEMENT:

I always get a bit of a thrill from answering interesting questions. It sparks something in me and inspires me. It brings me back to life when I’m low. I started writing poems based on questions back in 2002. I’ve collected the questions from poems, books, movies, billboards, ads, surveys, even the back of a cereal box once. Wherever I find them, I keep them and save them for future poems. When I pick one, the answers are rarely straightforward. Sometimes I try a direct answer and then drift off into mystery. Other times, the answers choose their own adventure, and I just sort of follow along where they lead. This is one of the latter. It was a question I found in an online survey, and it turned into a sort of love poem with sociological underpinnings and ended with a classic film. What does the answer mean? I leave that up to interpretation.