Wet Pennies

wet pennies is what I really want to say,

wet on a tongue maybe, or

blood, the scent of wet pennies, a sensation

of sharp metallics—

short lived on a tongue like the live end of a battery—it wouldn’t be mine, its all been said before.

These days many people will never know that scent of wet pennies. The courage it takes to leave one tails up on the ground, then wonder for days if good luck had been picked up.

The hundreds of millions of hands they’ll never know. The hands that have freely touched a single penny or kissed the mouths of those who have once tried.

Once,

I stopped following, it didn’t matter

I was locked in—the algorithm had me

regularly sending your bullshit

whether I liked it or not cursory scrolling time,

there’s always trees I thought, there’s always the sky I thought too, a sky with an almost white moist lime ceiling trying to decide between dew or rain before dawn.

Lime,

the ceiling I used to lay beneath.

Who for a minute would have ever thought a penny

could become so cliché?

A metaphor for value in 1989.

On the ground you’d pick one up

—Copper Lore mixed with dimes, nickels,

and quarters for a cup of coffee.

In line behind aged beauty with shaking hands counting out all the pennies to pay,

sent from an angel, a god, to Love.

1989 a humble farmer

from the Soviet Union

refuses to send tanks to Bornholmer Straße

a handful of peace held high—and hope.

He then allowed the wall to come down.