Birthday Buddies

Unless two humans were born within twenty-four hours

Of each other, people do not have the same birthday

The insanity to which human beings seek to create relatable infrastructures

Of context to appear as if connected and yet,

Avoid all true connection of that which we are, saddens me 

We celebrated the seventy-three year old secretary’s birthday in our office yesterday

There was an ice cream cake purchased by one of the girls

As this was the elder female and sympathy, endearment and assumptions of recognition

Are deemed more appropriate than for a more virile or busy crewmember

Driving offspring to basketball or to medical appointments 

My sixty-three Boomer-boss crossed in front of the septuagenarian’s desk today

“Madeline turned four today so y’all are close.”

“Aww, I didn’t know that,” replied the gray teased-perm man-haired great-grandmother  

It what way are these two connected, granted I could give the younger of the two

An allowance to reason that a date of birth is not midnight to midnight,

But the time one exits vagina or abdomen via section to which twenty-four hours pass

At which point one’s actual calendar remembrance of one’s birth is invariably the beginning  

And may be the actual minority of time for one’s initiation to external breathing

And the day following may be the majority and at which point this seventy-something and four

Do in fact structurally share the same conceptual tattoo of hours, yet I find protest  

The horoscopes and minutia of February 28^th or 27^th or 29^th are distraction to follow away

From the cosmic interconnection and existential search,

What is a birthday but a revolution of our sun? So these bell rings that we are as equidistant In the point of our revolution as the point of exit from our mother is of most irrelevance.  

Possibly conception, possibly Oh! such dangerous arguments of encoded personality-hood

Oh! what have we done, but become anarchists with the cards and the presents and the cakes

The balloons are full of helium and the best way to go in a modern American-ending

Is a tank from a party store, a plastic bag, tubing and pumped in helium  

Until it all ends in breathing, not choking, no gagging, just natural pass out

All these gunshot fools or bridge jumpers, oh so passé, It’s someone’s birthday today!

Tomorrow and the next, and in fact was yesterday and on and on

So obsessed with mythical bouts of kindred linking 

The time in our corneas, in our limbic nodes is calling,

We always were; you see, We always were.

The Weather

I abhor talk of the weather

The local or national news vomiting temperatures

Barometric pressures, highs and lows of a subset of hours

Curving fronts of a human performing charades 

In front of a green or blue screen tracking a clicker

Of a human spending four years or more of collegiate investment

To become a talking monkey to preach the history of molecules

Solidifying, dispersing and drifting in current and historic global patterns  

The relevance escapes me for the pertinence of what allocation of

Heat or cool occurred given that all such recording has dissipated into the oblivion

Of collective absence to be monitored by color-coded radar pin-pointing

Lightning strikes to neighborhoods when a human could peer out a window  

To observe yes it is raining now or a puddle formed and it must have rained earlier

I am befuddled as to the farmers, fishermen, or grass mowers of the Earth

Would not find such dynamic data in more relevant context via the internet

And this lust to record the perspiration of this Planet could subside to less than ten minutes 

Of my newscast into ten seconds, Oh God forbid the deluge or super-storm cometh!

Or the dry-drought or the snow-blizzard blow!

National fantasies will stare and grin and such weather events

I am aghast at the tribe worshiping what cannot be changed but in the collective 

We protest in the reality of carbon emissions and changes to our commute,

Yet see fit to include weather updates every quarter of an hour on the radio dial

The dead times, the hours and days wasted in a lifetime finding out the intricacies of weather

Damn you vacuuming time away from real journalism  

The time, the news, the stories of our super-organism,

None have been thieved by rouges and vandals as pernicious as meteorologists

Grant me even my sports time, but weather, weather, damn you, mother-fucking weather

I refuse to watch the news when you come on  

Hence forth you should be reduced to a box of the week’s projection of

A sun graphic displaying cloudy, sunny, rainy or snowy with an average temperature

For the location on a map, put the projection in screen crawl if you must, but truncate your spew 

At least one channel in New Orleans has News with a Twist

Where weather has been minimized to the regular anchor announcing the grand inquiry

of what kind of day it will be tomorrow with a single graphic and sentence and

Replaced the gluttony remainder of time with brass bands.
I find this infinitely preferable

Suck-numb on and on

Today,

I do not care about your family

I do not want to hear about your drama

I do not want to know you procreated and those offspring discovered

some nuance of life that is repetition

Today,

I want to be left alone.

I do not want to talk

I do not want to sense

I want to be numb 

I want to extract so that I do not have to exit

I want to process so that the backlog does not strangle

I want to express to myself, not for you, not for others, for me  

The gossip of the hallways is accelerating my combustion

I do not want this

I do not want the void

I want the numb so I can contemplate  

The parade of conversations appears meaningless

Toys of this planet, finite, pirate-talk

Matters not, matters so, matters not, matters go awash

In the brigand tides of there is no tomorrow or yesterday, only now  

Dissolving into sands stretching for the weakest among us

To grasp dignity in the refuse floating

I do not want to see or speak or hear or taste or touch or smell

The ocean enveloping, I simple wish to allow the process  

Be the nothing for a wave

Let the liquid oblivion soak

Return when the blank has quenched the stark  

The commotion is all the same word

Repeated, repeated, repeated

Screeching, screeching, screeching 

I have forgotten every reason.

I have forgotten every reason

The Mirror Wall

Nothing affects the numb, the impenetrable mirror wall of air

Surrounding thoughts as if no eagle can fly above or rabbit burrow under

The plane is thick like a time thief stolen and the heart beats

Seeing the grand empty stadiums of nothingness gathering in the glare 

Playing sport with hell and paradise inoculating men to deed

Means nothing to me

The challenges of routine appear like robotic instructions programmed in code

To carry out iterations for a given span of promises of ones and zeroes  

Through the gray unknowns, barking the only inoculant to the numb

Is to write, to drip out a measure of something worth a damn-bit

That this day was different, proven back amongst the others

That the endless thoughts in a set of hours mattered enough to assert 

A singularity of mention in the annals of historic fiction

That this life was worth living for a moment of illusion

Like a glistening ornament on a holiday no one believes in anymore

Transformed from living breathing organism into hung globes of snow  

Memories of no one knows, of stars and synthetic boreal behemoths

Assembled to bear credence to the passage of other days before that

Now crumpled into an attic and packed into a corner, viewed in revision

Promise of what honest is in comparison  

The days fall like snowflakes misting on with the pancakes steaming syrup

Sticky and salivating credence that days could breathe and begin again anew

The closets closed, the fabrics outgrown, the socks and feet they stir, they meet

The holidays of normalcy like Homer and his hound together gripped  

Like thoughts of suicide and Christmas

Thousands see another stream of Tuesday-normality

The wall of air buffers firm the stock of inventory blocked

Into dollars and currency charging the laws of a future’s gravity  

Exhausted in the stretch, never wanted the measure of a breath

To respiration moving gold, love’s treasures bought and sold

In the minutes ticking of someone asking for an answer with others talking

Doesn’t matter if the response is right, only that a blank is filled  

A solider returned, a man was killed, a body sits in post-traumatic stress

Idling nothingness of purpose, a man made to massacre and could not last the winter

With no one left to die, a skeleton has no tears to cry

Images return fly around the ceiling of the room like a winter’s wren

Coming in from the cold and trapped inside a living room grown old

Never leaving for seed his stomach is stretched to believe

Freedom must come from within and yet it so rarely ever does  

Cannot escape the turns, the days, the sun it all seems the same

The rise, the lies, the compromise to spell the names

Of men who use to bear my face

Too many lives lived in one case  

That was not me, not the me I am today

Not the man I want to face, not the man who can say the same

Loved a world that killed him, died until it ended stiff 

Rested and repair, the body of a man who is no longer there

Mirror lies and gives the mind the urge to scare

Scrape the shell and bend the hell into a power of the self

Carry-with the nutrients of time, the forest burned and soil shinned  

Savor man and hearts expand, belief that winter ends

March it sends the messages of trespasses to lend

The will to see the morn as a dream of forlorn

The love of meanings born  

In the hold of a child, the smile of a woman

The heart of understandings forgiven

In the prayers of heart spoken to the self

All the bygones ready for anyone to read on a shelf  

Lay them out ubiquitous turned meaningless

Say the refrains until they no longer sound pains

The repetition is internal volition to never succumb

To never fall prey to wish that what was could ever be undone  

Wars have been fought, bombs ignited and launched

The spears struck and tips broken off

Never get them out hold the handle like a spout

Only chance to pour the poison out  

Given time the blood is inviting the sharks

Stay so still, the ocean is bred to kill

Don’t speak, lie to the face of those that can breathe

Above the surface, dive to survive, dive, dive, dive  

Come back when evolved, see the sun and forget the calls

The bells and the snow, the moments of the calendar begin

Revolve and see that nothing ever ends, only choices made and made again  

Bloom the bloody days and melt the rings in the fire's hearth

See the lines blur and the discussions start

The monotony of cosmology, to seek the universe and see irrelevance

To see the opposite of every semblance  

Mirror out what is held within means the end of men

Reflection slow and welcome in the light of outside snows

Window’s transparency returns and all the lessons of the world are learned

Anyone becomes an outlet, an exit, a topic, a route and time revolts  

Ticking not in simulacrum-notation but an army of original manifestations

Each a lure, each a beauty obscured by the glare, the mirror of a turn

A choice inside the boast that this was all there is and testify the testament

The book, the books written and burned, burned and burned  

See the fire and all the days to unlearn

Now that the glow is finally gone, a man can see outside and walk through walls

Speaking to an Old Friend

Pretending I could talk to you again

Nurse the blanket and die with men of the bloody-shrapnel staring at the noon sun

Reverberating empty pocket slot-machines whispers to clouds

No rag to wipe his face to promise the shroud  

The tent, the bubble space for he and I to talk as if no one else was around

Together on an outing, promises of magical lions and appetizer salvations

Transubstantiating into live and die and you and I

Smiles cascading at the zenith of radiating solar rotation  

The precipitation breaks like a rabbit in the clearing

Rain in the desert, ‘Oh so amazing!’ found and found and down and down

The gullet go the refrains and the names and the same and the same

The rotation and the pains, imbibe and shine, epidermis is gleaming! 

Love and life, doom and strife, bleeding from pores and the crowd is rejoicing

The dandelions are espousing in the garden orchestra of logical nature

The sun and I are making peace out here in Iraq to Iran to Afghanistan

Wandering for a craggy oasis of where a hand formed man 

Apples and baffles consumed and given away in raffles to the chosen ears

And selected tears to know the truths of other moves, that are not worthy of today

And I want to pretend the game  

Maybe for a moment speak into the winter’s coldness

The warm escaping corridors of heated-sand, colors blurring as the blood leaves my hands

His, mine, theirs, ours, calendars and metaphors for self-defense and noblemen

Trayvon, crusades and Agamemnon, neutron bombs, Einstein and the universe beyond  

All I want is a simple job, a place like here, but over there

A house with walls of my own art, music playing and a fresh start

Help me go and treasures do not need to come in gold

Aid my passage and I will grant this moment as a whisper  

That for a moment the sun came out this winter

So much gray-wind I think I will head back in

Ranting such folly to myself

Nothing, Something and Now

Supposing the two alternatives on an afterlife
That there either is something or there is nothing

I would assume that in the path of nothing

The debate is moot; in the path of something  

 

I would imagine that the something would include

The probability of continuing iterations

As a single afterlife would cascade into another and another

The purpose again being moot  

As one of this universe or another or this body or another

The memories are structures of biology the acts potentially

Constructs on the spirit tagged with a human preoccupation with justice

As if the acts of others somehow reconcile with ours so that we are ranked  

I find such penchants juvenile and the machinations an irresponsible geometry

The mathematics simply do not hold in reversion to a oneness wherein

Any such consequences invariably cascades into the present

Into the self, independent of the reality of the self perceiving such impact  

However in pondering the afterlife path of the something and

Considering the probability of numbering such events I would imagine

That the majority of us, including myself would be in some iteration numbering

Greater than the first if such paths do exist  

We can fathom karma or reincarnation on this planet in a myopic quest for justice

Yet I distance from such measures of recompense as the numbering placements for life

Will always outnumber the active iterations of life as to imagine equality,  

Would see no new creation and the number of grandfathers

Dying in the complement of universes would have to equate to the number of grandchildren born in a given time, on a given date, such balance would appear to balance the burden of weights a spirit carries in this world, which of all things I find the most impossible  

For it is clear there are men and women bearing greater burdens than others,

Those who we dub blessed or cursed in an abundance of ease or arduous penalties

Sin or the dreaded-karma is used by neophytes resounding, ‘everything happens for a reason’

Or ‘what we do to others will come back to ourselves’ to which I retort 

I have never seen this, there is no evidence that the good are rewarded or the evil are punished

This is folly to thirst for lonely justice, which on each death bed after expiration to this next iteration or into nothing would be commensurately un-provable and left to unending debate  

So in this now, there is no need for justice, it is pure immaturity,

The dignity we afford to the weakest among us dictates our strength

It is in this principle to which we are married, not to a cosmic eternal justice

But to the recognition of what we are  

So in this the manifestation of the next is as irrelevant as when taken in far enough perspective

That time is irrelevant, there will never be tomorrow

There is only now, our choosing and our un-choosing of what was previously chosen

So that we are perpetually in the crucible of passing what we see as our point of judgment  

When in fact, we remain always in confirming or debating or reversing what we previously

Considered the moment of our definition; it is in this bed in which we live

Ever so, ever now, ever in balance with dignity of our previous paths, our future paths

Our current now we are choosing, always choosing; who we are as a super organism  

We witness, we taste, we hear, we smell, we see, we touch, we are aware and unaware at once

This is irrelevance of worry cascading into our decisions

This is the altar of the how we choose to respond to which we will never depart

Why Do We Pay So Much For Health Care in America: A mix of my thoughts and a recap from Time Magazine article

Why Do We Pay So Much For Health Care in America: A mix of my thoughts and a recap from Time Magazine article

Notes and thoughts from : Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

By Steven BrillFeb. 20, 2013

http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/#ixzz2LvESyFG9

Charge-master itemized rate-structures sit like maniacal-deranged Christmas wish-lists for hospital administrations, health-insurance companies, medical-device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical testing laboratories.  The manipulation and guise of profit hidden in the terms non-profit organization and research and development beguile the American people into the most costly health care system in the history of planet with health results falling behind a laundry list of countries which spend less.  

This article begs the question why does American health care cost so much while holding the more often asked question who should pay at bay.  What of the $77 gauze pads, $21,000 heart burn, $18 test strips, and $90,000 days in the hospital? 

Why with the unprecedented advances in digital technologies have health care costs skyrocketed rather than declined?  Has the human body changed?  Has the American body developed a fifth more complicated appendage burrowing to the right of our hip like a bottomless black hole to which doctors must spend unending resources to explore and spelunk for jeweled cancerous growths and precious opportunities for pharmaceutical chug-downs?   

Why is Medicare restricted from negotiating drug prices?  Why do we use average sales price plus six percent?  Why is a medically equivalency determination outlawed for taxpayers?  Why is comparative-effectiveness banned?  Why is Research and Development generally fifteen to twenty percent of gross revenue, yet the pedestal of defense to such charges?  Why do taxpayers through the NIH fund much of that research through our public universities and grants anyway?  When does a $25 payment for a woman’s plasma sold back to taxpayers and possibly her for $250?   

Why do we legislate to lobbyists?  Why are true costs of production for pharmaceuticals, medical devices, surgeries, laboratory tests, facility charges all hidden from the American people for any facility doing business with taxpayers?  Why are MRI and CT machines treated like amusement park rides run by carnies with this one takes 2,500 tickets, but today tickets costs $90 a piece for her and $5 for him? 

Why do we believe healthcare is a free market good?  Why do we believe healthcare is a free market good?  Why do we believe healthcare is a free market good?  Why do we believe healthcare is a free market good?  Why do we believe healthcare is a free market good?  Why do we believe healthcare is a free market good?  Why do we believe healthcare is a free market good?  Why do we believe healthcare is a free market good?  

Why do hospital administrations, insurance companies, medical device manufacturers, medical laboratories, and pharmaceutical companies hijack a pirated economy at the expense of taxpayers, patients and even doctors and nurses? 

Why is a day in the hospital more than four years of college?  How many women have been told their uterus is broken due to impatient Pitocin in manipulative C-sections to shorten labor delivery times at the expense of their family’s health and the profit margins of a hospital? 

Why is total cost incurred by patient choice so de-linked from patient choice?  How do we implement price sensitivity?  How do we create a digital infrastructure to demand upfront pricing for all based on national and regional standards of costs in a true non-profit paradigm?   

How many professional debt collectors haunt the phone lines of the unfortunate?  How many lawyers, lobbyists, CEO’s hide bank accounts?  How many $25 pills could be had at five cents apiece in any drug store?   

How many captive customers assume their care facility knows best and actually cares about the charge that trickles through their health insurance company which shows a paid benefit on a charge-master rate to pay seventy percent on an $8,000 test leaving the patient with $2,400 to their deductible for a service that cost the hospital $1,000?  How many people then think their employer did not give them a raise last year because of a $1,400 per month health insurance premium?   

Why should the health insurance companies keep all the younger less-ill patients when Medicare has lower administrative costs and despite laws handicapping the taxpayer’s ability to negotiate many items, still has lower administrative-costs per claim than any private insurer?   

Why does America’s fear of death and religious doctrine push us further from reasonable birth control and family planning and away from death with dignity, humane action and more cost effective end of life care?  Why is comparative effectiveness painted as a death panel?  Who profits?  

Why do drugs only have to outperform a sugar pill rather than other drugs on the market to get FDA approval?  Why do we focus more on patent life than medical effectiveness?   

Why do we have HIPA hiding our medical identities?  To protect us from our neighbors or from the private health insurance industry’s tyranny?  

If Medicare costs less than comparable private health insurance in total, why would we be raising Medicare eligibility rather than lowering it?  Extrapolate that concept then do math and think of your paycheck and what you and your employer pay for health insurance or health care and dollars that are missing from your take home pay to buy groceries, put gas in your car or dare be it take a vacation. 

Quote from the article 

“Unless you are protected by Medicare, the health care market is not a market at all. It’s a crapshoot. People fare differently according to circumstances they can neither control nor predict. They may have no insurance. They may have insurance, but their employer chooses their insurance plan and it may have a payout limit or not cover a drug or treatment they need. They may or may not be old enough to be on Medicare or, given the different standards of the 50 states, be poor enough to be on Medicaid. If they’re not protected by Medicare or they’re protected only partly by private insurance with high co-pays, they have little visibility into pricing, let alone control of it. They have little choice of hospitals or the services they are billed for, even if they somehow know the prices before they get billed for the services. They have no idea what their bills mean, and those who maintain the chargemasters couldn’t explain them if they wanted to. How much of the bills they end up paying may depend on the generosity of the hospital or on whether they happen to get the help of a billing advocate. They have no choice of the drugs that they have to buy or the lab tests or CT scans that they have to get, and they would not know what to do if they did have a choice. They are powerless buyers in a seller’s market where the only sure thing is the profit of the sellers.

Indeed, the only player in the system that seems to have to balance countervailing interests the way market players in a real market usually do is Medicare. It has to answer to Congress and the taxpayers for wasting money, and it has to answer to portions of the same groups for trying to hold on to money it shouldn’t. Hospitals, drug companies and other suppliers, even the insurance companies, don’t have those worries.”

Solutions suggested in the article 

·         Tighten antitrust laws related to hospitals

·         Tax hospital profits at 75 percent and have a surcharge on all non-doctor hospital salaries that exceed say $750,000.

·         Outlaw the charge-master, reflect transparent costs. (Hospitals are government sanctioned institutions.)

·         Amend drug patent laws and set profit-margin caps on drugs exploiting monopolies

·         Tighten what insurance companies can pay for MRI and CT scans

·         Tort Reform: Embarrass Democrats into stop fighting medical-malpractice reform and provide safe-harbor defenses for doctors

·         Require drug companies to include a prominent plain-English gross profit margin on the packaging of drugs  

My thoughts: 

·         See above, and read this American Manifesto Part Three: Health Care

·         Overall I concur with the direction of the article’s solutions.  Almost all of these fit better in a Single-Payer health care system (i.e. one national insurance company with untold negotiating power, done with advanced digital systems informing patients on where to get care, from whom and what charges to their copays and deductibles based on facility choice and actual cost to the health care system.)