i could buy these reading cups: now worth between 3,000 and 5,000 francs. i’d go to galleries in algeria or tunisia, i’d have them removed from the cabinets in the museums, from beneath the dust, i’d make the transaction, they could belong to me then and there. i even thought of buying them with the money i would make from this poem. i even thought of including them in this poem, but as i progress, they become more distant, and who needs reading cups when there is a poem to be read. i mean, written. the cups once bought would lose value like most of life a diminishing return or rather, latent; ghost.