SMART MONEY

Smart money swaggers into the room and eats
your lunch, then swivels and pauses, issuing
a belchless burp like Philip Morris
a smokeless cigarette, and devours
daintily the lunch of your friend. Smart

money has a meeting across the street under
another name. It was out of Arabians
and into Appaloosas before the horsey
set caught on. Reverse mortgage floaters
were appetizing eons ago, but now Russian

Vnesh ruble-denominated short-terms hedged
with Eurodollar options are spa cuisine
to a bulging balance sheet. Smart money
makes money going to the bathroom, hustles
through sleep to the morning’s gold fix

croissant, keeps its receipts. Leveraging time
like a catapult cantilevers its stone, smart
money flings conviction at the margin
while scooping starfish from the tide pool’s bounty.
It fired its lawyer while you paid yours up

the nose, it kissed off the girl that you kissed—
messy prenup to follow. It went long light sweet crude
when that seemed a tad insane. Smart money wiggles
into waders when there’s blood in the streets,
sucking up the overflow to corner the transfusion

market in the next disaster. Smart money, callow
and refined, is short of course: the weather,
your future, DRAM chip makers (it’s a commodity
stupid), the Shark at the Masters. Managed futures
provide a tale to wag the dog of debt. Smart money

only bites when the possibility of being bitten back
has regressed to the mean and is carrying the newspaper
in its mouth. Smart money knows the value of everything
and the price of nothing, standing on the dais, beaming
at its elder parents, out there somewhere in the gloom.