ABOUT THE POEM: This poem unfolds as a portrait of existential poverty, where “poor” means the absence of meaning, dignity, and cosmic fairness rather than the absence of money. The speaker sees himself at the bottom of the underworld, so far below the so-called poverty line that even the sky refuses him. He doesn’t beg the universe for mercy because he believes the universe owes him something far more fundamental: the right to clarity, the right to purpose. This sets the poem apart from ordinary despair; it speaks from a place stripped of false hope and stripped of desire as well. The central metaphor is poverty as a metaphysical condition. What is missing from him is not wealth but the very thing he believed was his birthright—perhaps dignity, perhaps recognition, perhaps cosmic reciprocity. His plan to build a rocket to a black-market galaxy selling “light by weight” becomes a darkly playful image of trying to purchase meaning where none is freely given. The poem’s climax transforms endurance into a creditor’s claim against the universe itself. It ends with a confrontation, not a prayer: a demand that existence finally reveal whether its silence is blindness or cruelty. This is a rebellion disguised as a question.I am so poor
that in the underworld I live in,
when I look up from the very bottom,
I can’t even see the poverty line
drawn across its sky.
Twinkle, twinkle little stars-
they are so many and far.
My hands are empty; I lift them tall.
They don’t like me; you keep them all.
I don’t hope, pray, or dream.
I don’t ask, beg, or receive.
I am that kind of poor.
My poverty isn’t the cheapness of intention,
the kind born from desire-the mirror of a weak character.
My poverty is the absence of what I believed was my right.
It is utterly absent,
and I am here to suffer and die searching for it.
The study that will reveal the difference
between being and not being-
while I am still trapped in the form of being-
that is the experiment.
That is the purpose.
I can’t snatch the stars from the sky;
that’s not me.
They don’t like me; that’s them.
I will build a rocket from hard-earned money,
and whatever little I make,
I will fly to whatever black-market galaxy
sells light by weight,
and pay full price
for every last indifferent photon.
I have acquired, by sheer endurance,
a creditor’s lien on the universe.
One day the accumulated interest
on that unpaid debt
will split the sky like cheap fabric.
And if there is a god up there,
hiding behind the dark,
I will grab him by the collar of his silence,
drag him down through the rip,
force him to his knees
in the dust I have swallowed for decades,
and ask-quietly, politely,
with the calm of a man who has nothing left to lose-
Are you blind,
or just cruel?
