The title of Dave Bonta's poem carries a pun. A trust fund is money held in safekeeping for someone else, usually an heir, but trust is also what a person gives to God, or struggles to give. The poem never says which kind of trust it means. It lets financial and spiritual language seep into each other until money worries and night-time prayers become hard to tell apart.
The opening command, "meet our money", sounds like an introduction at a party, as if money were a person to shake hands with. The next lines set it against the speaker: money is "supple where I have / been nothing but ice." The contrast is physical. Money bends and moves easily, while the speaker is stiff and frozen. Anyone who has heard of "frozen assets" will catch a second meaning, a fund that exists but can't be touched. The line break matters too. "Supple where I have" ends on the verb of possession, and the next line strips it away with "been nothing but ice." For a moment the speaker has something, and then he doesn't.
The second stanza turns from money to fear, and the language becomes older and heavier. "Great with child" is a solemn, almost biblical way of saying pregnant. Trust funds are usually set up for children, so the image fits: the speaker's fear is carrying something that will be born. The poem doesn't say what, but judging by the imagery it is more anxiety, or worry about a future someone else must inherit. Then comes "this hard god knows us." "Hard" answers "supple" from the stanza before, and "knows" has a biblical ring of intimacy and judgment. Because the poem has no punctuation, the god could belong to the pregnancy sentence or stand apart from it. The god might be a stern deity or money itself, and the poem leaves the question open. The word "us" echoes the "our" of the first line, so money and god both seem to claim the same group of people.
That lack of punctuation shapes the whole poem. There are no capitals, no full stops and no rhyme, and the lines run on into each other like thoughts at three in the morning. The stanzas shrink from three lines to three, then two, then two, so the poem seems to run low as it goes, like a bank balance or a breath. Sound does quiet work as well. The long *i* of "I," "ice" and "child" links the speaker, his coldness and the unborn thing he fears. Later the hard *c* and *k* of "cold" and "clock" tick like the clock itself.
The third stanza moves into a bedroom. "Waking in a cold bed" carries the frost of "ice" into the body, and "praying with the clock" is a striking phrase. The speaker prays *with* the clock, not *to* God, so the clock is his only company and time becomes the thing he keeps watch against. The old saying that time is money hovers behind the line without being spoken.
The last stanza is a fragment: "as if to pinch a few / words together." It has no main verb, and the "as if" admits that the effort may be pretend or may not work. "Pinch" suggests pinching pennies, as if words were now as scarce as coins. It also suggests the way one pinches a seam or a wound shut. The prayer, and the poem itself, are the "few words" being scraped together. After lines full of "our," "us" and "I," the poem ends on "together," the one word of joining, offered tentatively.
The poem is small and says very little outright. It shows how money can turn into a kind of religion, and how religion can feel as anxious as bookkeeping. It also reminds us that when people are afraid, they often reach for the same few words. By pinching its own language so tightly, it manages to be about both fear and faith without settling on either.