That money talks I'll not deny, I heard it once: It said, "Goodbye."

Richard Armour (1906–1989) was an American poet and humorist known for light verse and satirical takes on everyday subjects, including money, status, and modern manners. This quatrain is characteristic of his mid‑20th‑century magazine-and-book style: a familiar proverb (“money talks”) is set up and then undercut by a punchline that turns the saying literal. Rather than offering a specific historical occasion, the lines read as a general comic observation about personal finance—especially the experience of money’s sudden disappearance—delivered in Armour’s compact, epigrammatic manner.

The poem plays on the cliché “money talks.” Armour concedes the saying, but twists it into a joke: the only time he “heard” money speak, it was leaving. The humor depends on literalizing a metaphor and on the abruptness of the farewell, capturing the common feeling that money is most “vocal” when it is being spent, lost, or taken away. Beneath the wit is a mild critique of consumer life and financial anxiety: money’s power to “talk” is real, but for many people it speaks less in promises than in departures—an ironic comment on how fleeting financial security can be.