Because you are a poet,
I want to give to you, in my mutual poverty,
a million dollars worth of understanding.

If the money were real, you could be
kept away from your locked-up secretary
work, and you could be instead at a vast paper

writing away your mind,
and weaving away your ideas and gathering
the fibers of your poetic nature.

I know this, so I give you,
symbolically, all these jewels and gold
to free you from your onus of living up to standards

and to release you like a sacred monarch
onto hedonistic hills and intrinsic islands,
so you may be a poet there, my fellow connoisseur.