DEATH Poem: The Balance Sheet of Affections: Quantified Love Guarantees Spiritual Debt., by Feiran Wang

Poem 1. The Yield
Born prematurely into selfhood,
before touch, I rehearsed departure.
Those before you taught exits, not entrances—
their lessons carved in absence.

A speculator of affections,
I traded glances for fleeting nearness,
each bond too brittle to hold.
Risk was my currency; staying, a bet I never placed.

An arbitrager between mask and marrow,
I weighed minted lovers, their clinking vows—
love’s value, depreciated at first touch,
a coin worn thin by handling.

Hedged against tenderness,
longing drifts at a floating rate,
need pools darkly, illiquid.
To love and liquidate—the oldest trade.

I am the residue of a sexless schooling—
not Confucian rigor, but parents
who misplaced me in their shadowed nights:
a zombie asset, rotting in dark pools of unspent want.
Textbooks taught systems, not skin—
guilt before pleasure, silence the mother tongue.

OCD’s survivor, I tally sunlit sins,
while your kiss—an iceberg order—
thaws unseen in veins. What is love
where need is moral failure?

Yet I kneel. I suffer. I beg. I believe. Not for worth, but for will.
Not to be remembered, but to endure.
What once broke me calcifies into past.
What once made me scatters toward futures unpriced.

Poem 2. The Floating Rate
Reality cloaks itself in ritual—daily acts, ordinary sights,
veils for light and shadow.
We shroud the dead, close doors,
yet all must pass through.
When reality frays at its edges,
a face—not death’s—peers through:
a fissure, unhedged, where love drifts,
a floating rate tethered to your breath.

I once priced affection like a bond—
fixed term, fixed yield, predictable decay.
But you moved beside me, a risk
no model could tame, only heart could bear.

I watched you sleep—
your shoulder, a soft exchange rate,
your breath, inflationary, spiraling desire
pegged to no anchor but you.
Now I carry you, a volatile asset—
too vital to hold, too alive to hedge.

Poem 3. The Stress Test
I set the city ablaze,
my grimace mirrored in its flames—
a footnote etched across its skyline.
Time buckles as fire laps
the tower’s ticking heart.
In that moment, we are decimal dust.

I kissed you, knowing I was insolvent—
affections over-leveraged,
promises traded beyond my means.
Yet you held me, collateral
no bank would underwrite.

I wake bare from the dream—
morals twitch, paranoid,
restraint gutted by wealth’s excess.
This body, a credit derivative,
unravels in the dark—
a seam-splitting loan, an interest-choked heart.

Our embrace: the terminal stress test,
where the soul declares bankruptcy—
the final audit flashing through my mind:
a ledger of unsent letters, unspoken truths,
and the hands I never held,
already written off as losses.