---
title: "Nobody Owes Anything Now"
author: San Kala
date: 2026-10
canonical: https://www.sankala.me/notes/nobody-owes-anything-now
---

# Nobody Owes Anything Now

**A poem by San Kala**

Set in an O’Neill cylinder, a rotating space habitat. Stanzas are separated by blank lines; within a stanza, lines after the first are indented, as in the original.

---

Here the ground goes up.

From my door the fields climb  
  past the lake, past the woods,  
  over my head,  
  and down the far side of the sky  
  back to my door.

It is a cylinder,  
  twenty kilometres across,  
  turning in the dark  
  so that I stay on the ground.

For a while, money was all that mattered.  
  Save every penny.  
  Money made more money.  
  Mine made the rent.  
  Until it didn’t.

Then nothing needed doing  
  that a person had to do,  
  and money stopped mattering.

For some.

The AI was aligned.  
  It was aligned to us.  
  It was aligned to me.  
  Not to them.

They found my name on a list.  
  That night I slept in a bed.  
  For several nights  
  I kept my shoes on.

Then it was land.  
  Where you owned land.  
  Somewhere the summer let you sleep.  
  There was only so much of it.

Then it learnt to make land.

It took a country  
  and rolled it like a sleeve  
  until the edges met  
  over my head.

Some people stayed on Earth.  
  There is only one,  
  and nothing can make another.  
  I was not one of them.

I have an orchard overhead.  
  When it rains there,  
  the rain falls up,  
  towards its own ground.

Last week I took the train  
  round to that orchard.  
  From under its wet leaves  
  I looked up at home.

At night there are no stars above me,  
  only the lamps of the far shore,  
  and someone under them  
  looking up at mine.

The house offered me a plain blue sky  
  to hide the far shore.  
  I tried it for an afternoon.  
  It was like drawing the curtains.  
  I keep them open.

I have thirty kilometres  
  and more houses than I can sleep in.  
  I chose their windows.  
  Nobody looks out of them.

So I painted POTTERY on the roof.

Visitors come in at the middle,  
  where the cylinder turns on its axis  
  and nothing weighs anything.  
  Children let go of their coats  
  and watch them wait in the air.  
  The lift brings them down through the clouds.  
  Their feet find the floor  
  on the long way down.

Most of them go to the lake.  
  Some of them come in.

I didn’t get the Earth.  
  I take a little earth  
  and work it between my hands.

The wheel turns  
  inside the turning.  
  The clay climbs my hands  
  the way the land here climbs,  
  all the way round.

It made a cylinder  
  thirty kilometres long.  
  I am making one  
  that fits in a hand.

It could make a better cup.  
  It could make a thousand  
  before the kettle boils.  
  It cannot make this one.

The handle has taken all morning.  
  I try it with two fingers,  
  then three,  
  and make it wider  
  for a hand I haven’t met.

A woman comes in  
  with an hour between ships.  
  She leaves her bag by the door.  
  For a while she watches my hands.

Then she takes a cup from the shelf,  
  turns it over,  
  and reads my name.

“You made this?”

Yes.

“What do I owe you?”

Nothing.  
  Nobody owes anything now.

I wrap it in paper.  
  She kneels beside her bag,  
  moves a book,  
  a scarf,  
  and makes room.