What I came here to write about was a system that measures love, one that weighs the heart and the force that makes it pump and warm a body, and counts the labor spent, the attention paid, the care given for the benefit beyond survival and self. I wondered if any ledger had ever recorded the labor that love fuels. I searched: the earliest recorded history, the modern measures of bodies and systems, even the language itself.
I found none.
I found clay vessels filled with shapes. I broke them open. More hardened clay, deadened earth; once held and traded, nothing more.
I found rags, cotton and linen waste from the textile industry, smashed, bleached, and printed into notes in the images of once powerful men long dead. I found symbols from hands five thousand years gone, and numbers that said nothing at all about anything they spoke for.
One of these minted authorities I met in the flesh, in a room with a flag in the corner — cloth dyed and stitched into shapes, kept by a written code: never to touch the ground, never unlit in the dark, and owed, when worn through, a dignified death by fire. I came asking for an equal share of the time with my children, days and nights alike. The problem, it turned out, was the nights, the hours when nothing is measured, when a child is only breath in a dark room. I was denied, and when I pushed, told I was making it about the money. I hadn’t done my homework; I didn’t know the nights were priced. I knew one thing: I wanted as much time with them as I could have. I had asked in nights. The answer came back in dollars.
On the table sat an instrument that had already made every night about the money, and what it weighed was the earnings of a man who no longer exists. Me, years gone: single, unspent, ten-hour days with no one waiting at the door, weekends that healed, hours to burn. It priced his wages to the cent and laid them on me like stone — as if you could call a swimmer back a decade after his last race and bill him the difference between his old times and his living body, because he once could do it. That salary reached the table the way light reaches you from a star already dead: still arriving, still bright, the source long gone.
Dead light, weighed to the cent. And nowhere in it a cell for what the chase would cost the ones it claims to serve; a father spent to feed a number, nothing left at the door. The one thing a child needs that no cell of it will ever hold—a parent still breathing when the day is done— is the very thing it burns for fuel. I looked for the other pan of the scale, the one that weighs whether my children sleep, or eat, or are safe, or are loved. There is no other pan. It weighs the dead. It cannot weigh what breathes.
It took me thousands of words to say this. I won’t publish them. They explained what never earned explanation, and they swung too wide. So be exact, once: the weight of these things is real. A corpse still has weight; ask anything it lies on.
The weight was never my quarrel. The claim is the lie: that a shape with no ear for breathing and no cell for the word no speaks for what breathes. That a number that never asked how a child came to be, and cannot ask what a child needs, speaks in my children’s name. No ground, no merit, no standing. The law keeps a Latin for it: void ab initio. Void from the start; void before the first shape was pressed into clay. I’m done addressing ghosts.
Thousands of words against a structure that eats the living breath to keep its empty corpse inflated.
Fuck that.
They have names. Once, and not again: the bullae of Uruk. Johann Tetzel. Albert of Mainz. The House of Fugger. The Federal Reserve note. Moody’s. Standard & Poor’s. Fitch. Terra. Bybit. Goatseus Maximus. Title IV-D. The Bradley Amendment. The worksheet. Senate Bill 397. The score on your wrist.
And when one of them speaks again, hear it as a whisper behind the trees, a shape in the shadows. Shine your light on the space. Nothing was ever there.
These words are dead too. Let no man or machine pretend otherwise.
Anything written here is where the page burned and blackened when I spat flames.
Anything read here is fire kindled in your own veins.
This closes the set of three.
Fire tongue 🔥
The hate ledger: I Hate the United State of America
The faith ledger: Who, or What, Holds your Heart?