Short Haggled Poems

We dickered and haggled the vendor and me
The price I wanted to pay he could not see
Fifty US dollars is my final offer, I said.
I’ll keep it he replied; probably until he is dead....

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A black powder 1868 colt revolver.
Dad’s rusty Buck knife.
A few old Zippo lighters.
Ivory figurines haggled over 
with an illicit trader in Shanghai,
same for a two hundred year old
silk rug never trod upon.
A tin box with a broken clasp
containing some things 
I cannot now speak of.
A few other keepsakes
that when I look at them
remind me of how I got here,
and how I sometimes
lost my place....

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