A penny for a poem, anyone?

I have stopped being a poet.
I have started selling my words,
and I find it too difficult, I must tell you.
Writing used to be fun
in the early days, a hundred thousand years ago.
Now I am old — or maybe I just feel that way — 
and selling is the trade I have learnt in my years of growing up.

What more is there to say?
Maybe that I never was a poet
 — youthful exuberance — 
yes, that was all there was to it.
Now I am older and a stickler for money.

Nights when love and the moon arrested me,
mornings when I could feel the dew on my windowsill,
on my hair, sometimes on my pants — 
I need new pants — yes, now that is all there is to it.

Have I changed much?
Perhaps not. The dew still keeps at my windowsill,
but I do not feel it anymore.
I feel the rent of my two holed kitchenette-cum-sleeping-space
drawing a hole in my pocket.

The romantic nights do not pay anymore,
the drunken saturdays, the bedtime fantasies,
they do not pay for my Sunday lunch.

I once thought I was a poet.
Now I am a word-seller,
a cheap trickster
writing midnight posts on medium.

No, do not think I lament.
I persist.
I sell my words to be heard.

On another night,
in another life,
words will not be sold anymore.
That night, I will be a poet again.
Till then, this is all there is to it.