Charles Jensen | Writer

This isn’t a religious poverty, for we have so much spirit we are bloated with it. This isn’t emotional poverty because we feel things, really feel things. We have a lot of feelings, a glut of feelings, so many feelings we cannot even name all the feelings we have and they are too quick and too fierce to be tied down.

This is not a poverty of ideas because our heads will not rest.

This is not a poverty of opportunity because the world belongs to us, it holds us on its tongue and we are the pearl in its oyster. You are the pearl in the oyster. There is no poverty of safety when I am with you.

There is no poverty of distance, for all we have is separation, distance, miles and maps; we have gasoline tanks and hybrid cars and even once we had a rapid transit tram—and there was also that time we walked together and held hands like nobody cared.

There is no poverty of reasons. Reasons are sticking their pointy noises from the soil all over the yard and each one smells like you. And I know the reasons will bloom into permissions at any moment, so close are they in the Mendel square of overall worldwide genetics.

And our imaginations are not poor. If I listed all the ways I have already experienced you in advance I would be arrested for indecency on the spot. I would be arrested for gross negligence of propriety and I’m okay with that. This is not a poverty of freedom so they can take that from me. This is not a poverty of love so they can take that from me. This is not a poverty of future because nobody owns the future, not even God. Not even us.

This is not a poverty of present because I live in it with you, I own it with you. I walk side by side with it with you, the three of us, and we are there, not poor, not hungry, not alone.