Friday, April 29, 2016

If I am not here where am I,

I feel the vertigo. 
I am trying to anchor in this idea of being. 
I am trying to shed personhood. 
The machine of the brain comprehending is all a body is. 

A body is the arbitrary source code of genetics. 
The true matrix is not just the world or the atomic universe. 
Well it is, but the true way to access comprehending the matrix
Is to understand one’s body is the matrix.

The source code is one’s genetic assembly. 
The machine conducting human perception is not so much an enemy,
But a machine operating inside a systematic web of illusion
Evolved in the source code of what one is as part of the atomic universe.

Becoming conscious of this has me,
Distancing consciousness from my machine brain (i.e. the ego).
To participate in the human exchanges on a surface level instigates a level of trauma. 
Rattles, I see the layers, subtext mathematics in basic placeholders serving as symbols.

A computer, an orange on a grocery shelf.
“How is it going?”
“My daughter had her confirmation.  She’s a junior, not graduating yet,”
Seeing societal construction of worries, fears, tasks, basic come to work paycheck with fish eyes. 

Ant’s pheromone nature of instinct in iPhones. 
Bucking consciousness. 
[escape], but knowing there is nowhere else to be,
But in this machine as the idea of me.

Not that I want to be another person. 
The idea of segmentation is arbitrary, illusionary. 
The idea of I do not exist in any of the paradigms child assumed were real. 
None of this I am touching or serving is real. 

Panicking and calming meditating in cycles of consciousness.
Want deeper and oblivion.  
Want lost comfort in ignorance.  I
Want to have like sugar or being intimate or a surface level to extract brain pressure and be good, but

That quit working. 
I am like an addict understanding none of the drugs work. 
Deep awareness in love, sex, and human contact of going to and exploring that internal place together. 
I want to cultivate that and have failed horrendously. 

The inability to operate on the surface anymore or even to some extent prevents the spark. 
I felt becoming a farce of the machine of brain of the paradox of the matrix enveloping the whole deal of being consumed by the tentacles and layers of breathing the Jello in whole throat. 
Balance. 

This is a rabbit hole. 
No one would openly choose to enter if they were aware of the cost. 
Body to touch, hand to hold, lips to kiss, lungs to breathe with…

If it wasn’t for survival of the vehicle almost all human behavior would be altered or eliminated.  
Thus most of what people do is arbitrary and impertinent to what reality and existence actually are.
We are love, as basic an idea as it gets, god-juice, energy, love in conveyance
Independent of the atomic as one shifting our perception of illusionary barriers of segmentation

We hunger for the flow, sometimes enraptured in the encapsulation of a pill-casing termed identity
Of other, of self, of friend, of lover, of family, of enemy 
But the unbound is one love swishing inside itself, 
That is what we are  

Thursday, April 28, 2016

The Illusion of Reality Atlantic article by Amanda Gefter

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

My response to the article.  

There are two levels: the metaphysical foundation of what are we, i.e. the machine question and what is reality.  I have written a lot on this subjects, but I wrote this once,

“What we choose is what we perceive in confluence with all beings.  The choices made by what is perceived to be volition in the forms of a higher cognitive function mind deliberately choosing, a lower cognitive function animal operating on what we call instinct, a bacterium replicated, a virus attacking a cell or a photon taking both particle and wave, these are iterations of what possibility is.  This is the universe.  Reality is the subsection of this confluence our perception is limited to digest in this current form.” 

The what are we question…

I think the ego wants to be touched the way a mother touches child in all the iterated physical, emotional, and mental forms to correlate with evolutionary instructions of survival, but reality is not touch.  True reality is an absolute interconnectedness that our human form hinders.  The pinnacles of the human experiences are when we are shedding this restriction when we express love, presence, deep personal conversations and acts of sublimating our ego for this greater idea of what we are, we feel most alive when we are letting go of our ego.  The ego to me is the evolutionary pilot of the machine of our brain that spiritual reality needs to be a person, but does not need the ego to be what we really are.  We meaning the collective entire universe we. 

The ego and sensory perceptions of the body coddling the ego perceive a biased image of reality based on evolution through the filters we employ inside the human paradigm.  A dog does not see a piece of fruit the way a human sees a piece of fruit.  A human does not smell that piece of fruit the way a deer smells.  Reality is a function of the observer.  This is the evolutionary advantage Hoffman describes that it is advantageous for an evolved organism to perceive reality in a distorted form. 

What the universe is: human, plant, mineral, plasma, etc. is of a common thread beyond the atomic.  Once you take atoms and time out of the paradigm of existence and you contemplate the metaphysical what are we, what is this, the big crayon type questions, I tend to get back to this idea that tangible reality perceived inside this human form is yes like the article alludes, subjective to the observer.  Reality is like a film strip where each member of the audience has a different camera angle and lens pointed at the same universe.

The kindness and hurt that our volition elects to engage is not consequence-based beyond space-time.  True reality is not evolving, saving, or damning the self in a paradigm outside the now.  The ego wants perpetuation in death, not annihilation so it creates tethers of consequence.  The ego is an illusion of the brain and to me has nothing to do with that metaphysical spiritual equation.  The ego wants the “you did a good job, bad job” thing.  The ego wants a personal purpose and to make a difference, to participate in the great big jello to see it giggling reverberating the good we did in the world and take some kind of solace in the wave’s vibration. 

The waves and the good we do or do not create are not about us or just us creating them.  The true basis of reality is interconnected, all of it.  So to think on the platform of time and claim “I did good or I did bad” is to segregate self and other, living and non-living, environmental setting from actors, it is to postulate a stage exists.  There is no stage.  There is only stimuli to our sensorial intake-devices interpreting physical reality in a manner comfortable to the ego in our brain. 

The quantum level of reality informs us that a particle will take two forms at once.  This quote from my book might help to explain, what I think that means

“Why did an atom go where it went?  Not because it chose to go left instead of right or to operate as a particle rather than a wave.  The atom went where it went because it simultaneously went and is all ways.  It went all possibilities.  Our brains may struggle to conceptualize this, because we perceive it went left.  The atom participated in forming this organized thing we call a star because we perceived it.  We perceive the light created from the star.  We perceive the energy moving into our skin supplying us with vitamins to survive.  However our observation in the platform of the now only truncated all the other possibilities of what it is also doing in the rest of that jar of space time called possibility (the realm of might).   

All that potential exists so that the definition of what is the barrier that separates one being from another, one nation, one planet, one galaxy, one nebula to the entire boundless or bound universe to a yactometer on a quark operating on a quantum scale, the largest is comprised of the smallest.  These rules of mathematics active in a particular universe as part of a multiverse serve to expose the flow of the whole shifting inside itself. 

In this we see that what we are is not a self, we are not a summation of particles, but we are possibility itself.  We are potential.  Volition is the paint brush of the potential that we perceive; it is not the determination of what we are, will be, or were.  We are always all things.  The past and future are only illusions.  We are always the is, as all possibility itself.”

This idea of we are possibility, we are the is, I am not me metaphysical popcorn gets back to this if it is all an illusion then what is the point, why are we here sort of deal.  Does being good or bad matter?  The short answer in my interpretation of reality is that first we are not the identities we perceive, so take of the I or the we mask and with it the human mask, or the Earth mask or the evolved organism mask.  We are not limited to any of those parameters.  Then for me I take off the god illusion that there is theistic master puppeteer or genesis engine or voyeur.  To me we are it, all of it.  We perceive ourselves as spliced, but that segmentation is an illusion.  These ideas of conversing to another, the idea of other and self are illusions in a paradigm of individuality beholden to the ego. 

So this gets us to the second question, what is reality…

The true nature of reality is.  Reality just is, without form or atomic matter or time, it is not hot or cold, or feeling good or bad, reality is a constant balance and does not require joy or anger, or want, reality is.  The human in us wants some kind of mathematical conclusion to the play, to explain, to be earned, it wants to feel, we may crave this eternal peace, and consciousness of all atomic reality, being ubiquitous and present. 

The human in us contemplates this idea of being and may think, “The idea of just being would be boring or sad or not happy at all.  Life cannot be that drab or dark.”  We may contemplate the idea as darkness as if there is something to sense to be seen as if we are missing the living and forlorn we are not reunited with the dead.  However this would be ego-talk, we were never us.  Time does not exist.  Time is an illusion like space is inside the paradigm of the atomic.  Space-time is an illusion of perception we manifested to participate.  I think that is part of what Hoffman is getting at when talking about how quantum physicists can teach neurologists about the walls neurologist’s are running into in research. 

Our true spiritual nature simply exists.  Atomic reality is a paradigm of segmentation allowing consciousness in order for a paradigm of perception to exist.  Hoffman talks about how in brain surgery segmenting the right form the left hemisphere takes one consciousness and splits it into two.  I think this is an apt analogy for how the atomic universe works. 

To me humans operate on three levels: a base spiritual reality of what we are as a foundation, on top of that is a layer of consciousness where we occasionally are aware of aspects of our spiritual nature, and a perception of space-time reality which serves as both barrier and corridor to access the other two.

In the spiritual sense there is no way to perceive, no before or after or during, there is only now.  So there is no way to look or hear or think etc.  In atomic reality what we see is relative to the viewer, (i.e. the theory of relativity and viewing a star that no longer exists in the light trailing in from the night sky or the way a baseball batter will see the ball where her or his brain projects the ball to be based on the frame of reference of the pitcher’s release hand and not where the ball actually is at that point in time of perception.)  So if there is a basic question of why do we exist evolved in this form of reality that is not true reality the answer to me is because it is a paradigm in which perception is possible.

We are simultaneously in both states.  We are in that state of being connected as everything and we are also here segmented in this biological illusion of a human self.  The us that is in that state of being: one has no physical distance from our atomic self, because the spiritual component does not take up physical space and two does not contemplate the idea of us or consider we are us.  The spiritual component does not think.  It merely is.  The we “there” is not a piece of a finite whole.  There is no boundary or space-time.

I think the greatest misunderstanding of life is that it is a journey.  There is no journey to travel to reveal what we are and how we grow to see that best.  We thin the veil through art, kindness, interconnection, love, music, mercy, yoga, empathy.  This is why these acts are the truly pertinent endeavors of being human.  We thin that veil by removing or dampening the obstacle of ego and self we created.  Animals, plants, stars, operate in the same mathematics.  Only there is no mind or is a less biologically-evolved mind to even include the ego. 

One can see the beauty in a rock in this way.  Entire groups of atoms just are.  They are just being a rock, not fretting when will the universe end or when will this planet get hit by a meteor so I can quit being a rock.  There is none of that.  There was no beginning to the atomic universe.  It simply always has been, just like the spiritual component we participate always has been. 

The atoms in us transpose and have been and will be parts of other nonliving and living illusions of segmentation in the atomic universe.  This gets back to the quantum scale of thinking Hoffman discusses.  To attach a status of living to a human being is to ignore the ideas on a quantum level of: “Am I what I have always been and will be?  Am I a machine?  Does the idea of I am exist?  In biological death what changes and in what paradigms?”

To me I find the following two ideas complete the puzzle.  Perception is the point of atomic life.  Being simply is.  These are the balancing weights on the scale of existence. 

Maybe ideas like that are reasons we may look at the Dali Lama and think whatever he is doing he is on to something.  We look at someone being at a musical concert alive in that moment playing guitar or spouting poetry alive sharing, those people are on to something. 

There is also a seesaw of balance with work to keep the species afloat to meet the basic human needs of food, shelter, housing, healthcare, etc. to maintain the vehicle of our bodies and the societal environment our biological life requires to function.  This physical balance facilitates access to the spiritual reality of being.  There is love in acts of work.  There is empathy and presence.  Our species behaves like a grand nest in which we are twigs.

The grand mistake is to think there is some great prize of a lifetime attained with stacked decades of wisdom as if we are climbing a mountain and being young one cannot see or contemplate it.  The nature of true reality is always here.  Most of society is trying to thicken the veil, while a minority is trying to thin the veil.  It is in this consciousness the fate of our species balances extinction and presence.  If we fail or succeed for what length of time is not the point.  The point is how conscious we are in the present moment as we perceive the strip crossing the projector of our sensorial bodies in the illusionary platform of space-time we stand.  That is atomic life; that’s the deal.  The rest of atomic life is past, future, and illusion.  Atomic life balances with being.  The two together are the answer I go with, but what do I know.  I will never be done reading and thinking about these basics, but this is about where I am now as explained in a few pages.

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Jazz Fest in New Orleans 20160423 with Pearl Jam and gonna see a few friends

In the fields accustomed, no camera, the lack of wanting voyeuristic pats on the back, the space of the anti-Instagram, phone-kisses, winked-nudges

Grayhawk and Houma Nation putting on a show by the fry bread, I’m reading Andy’s Axeboy’s Blues in the grass tree-shade with blue sky writing above Big Sam for his funky nation. Mobilian tongue dancing feathered turning faster on the drum stops, The Fais Do Do stage in the backdrop Gal Holiday Honky Tonk drowning the call

This place is about the drum beat, indigenous with a European ocean paying seventy bucks a head to get sun burnt, like me here I have these fried green tomatoes and a seven dollar strawberry smoothie thinking of Jared Paul and the good attempts and the stale taste of my placated ego infused with the rhythmporium’s offerings

The organ and gate of men six foot two or taller escorting five foot girls in sunglasses, shorter shorts than what makes laying in grass without a blanket palatable to fair skin, the call of a woman in earshot who has given up on dating, spotting an African elephant mosaic tank top pony tail with a shirtless visor Bro with his beer in hand scanning side to side for where to look, what to do after the sex and this half-shirtless in public nodding

The savannah gaze, the eyeing up targeting system of who would allow a body, body to want in split second calculus of what is water, what is the fishbowl and the lines of bodies ogling bodies, the evolved corneas and retinas of under-surface to surface, of kelp, redwood, and fern, of fish, cow, and whale

Big Sam hits the Gentilly stage downbeat, white-hat, sunglasses, exposed chest hair, Japanese guitar player filling in with a Saints Cap and a Who Dat, burst clap, there is the rise up, the grand uptown funk, let’s go crazy, the purple one turned himself into a symbol because Prince understood something most people do not

Therein the crowd is the I am not here, the idea of reality concept of nothing but party skinned bones in the pot, flesh gumbo; what color toenails? What jersey, call and response: is two toned but one frequency depending on how one modulates listening, one idea of obedience in staged people, the idea of I need to be here in the way an extrovert ideal seeks to please external expectations to see as suitable, pragmatic to keep the surface of the water unperturbed; two is a connection of the all, participating in something greater entirely;

Beauty of a woman with flowers in her hair, a halo of pollen and ovum, the mechanism of the pollinator will come to the petal, tied and goading death for hopscotch genes immortality for the ego, extrapolation, collateral Darwinism

Zombie apocalypse grocery store of it all, windmill guitar seeing for aisles and aisles, the idea of the play-card, the commandment of why all this surface speak garble without speaking, the hyper complex human signal structures to avoid an intimate direct interaction, the anarchy of being present and acknowledging the drum beat underneath in this implausibility of wildebeests

The aviator sunglasses to make eyes bigger, face symmetrical, the foot tattoo covered and not when desired to expose the personal nature of ink on the page, the shrinking and taking of gray painted toenails.  Brain evolved to associate contact with increased likelihood of genetic reproduction and survival, the inescapable web of biting biological math

So it is to say, I am not here, not a lot of the time, there are waves, scents detected on the breeze, but this conversation, the one we are all having and occasionally listening, most through fear of death stitched to the underbelly annihilation of the ego, the path has taught me to let go as much as possible, to see color in the infinite darkness in the space beyond the atomic acquaintance of greeting in a form foreign to the surface conception of reality we inhabit in breath or the way you probably would like to hear it; the message, the general discourse, the way of what is up or going on; etc. but then there is this drumbeat

The tattooed foot-stomp anklet movement of painted fungus toenails doing the math, working out when to press and rise, release and press, to have a good time, to make some noise, the exposed skin to blast pheromones in claps of muscle tone, sweat and why this tattooed indigenous Mayan design white bicep exists walking past second lining for pussy to be viewed by bodies

Gambit, shake of hands or smiles in the strawberry lemonade vodka holders sweetness iced and coating the tongue, the lure of Eden floral halos planted, We are gonna turn this mother out, yellow can of who wants the funk to break it down jiggery mash

The un-seeing becomes as basic as seeing at an impasse of un-learning the universe appears for what it always is, the basics, the man with the microphone saying get down low on the floor and do you and modulated to what frequency ?  Do you put your hands up and clap bent knee and what is one hearing?  What is it to be in the moment and let go; the sub-vision of severed volition and dilution of dual wielders choosing the same act, taking the same action, but to do so for divergent understandings of the reality in which they participate

Big Chief Keke and the Comanche Hunters, Indians of the flame, got that water, the torrent of feather dress, spy boy, old yeah you right Bamboula family and get the hell out da way, cut short

The bladder call and Apu-Simpson’s check-out port-o-let line math to pick the one with the most men, no chit chat, stand-up speed rotation of the red to green turnstile in the stench of shit, piss, testicles and cunt rollup to deposit circular alcohol excavation, everything is easier for a penis

People chewing on each other enumerated like crawfish shells in the dirt after the boil, tasty and rancid, the exoskeleton exposed syphoned refuse, the black-lined tail veiny scar, not waiting the twenty-four hour fresh water purge for sacred intestinal chewing; the bodies chew in the mud, particles mashed swamp of moments indigestible shells swallowed, pulled-out meat tossed aside to gulp the grime, the bodies of claw, leg, and sucked head, peanuts and oysters mouthed, not for the nut or soft jelly mollusk, but for the hardened eternity in a droplet of sun of a body defending itself; we are salivating for outsides,

As we attempt to be in this melee genetically engineered to persist; to attempt an advanced operative persistence, this is to be a being, to take that soft essence and spit or hide it, to disguise the squish-belly in an infinite jest of drapes, masks for camera lenses boomed scanning crowds for broadcast and long division for a new reality show pimping time’s laughter in cell phone snap-shots crackling nebula of costumes avoiding prone abdomens, the videographers munching on labor scab bones impaled marrow licked, more gray toenails and flip flops, well-trimmed foot arches mimicking dance steps and spread legs asking angles to be measured, the dilation of centimeters, the way god comes flirtatious with death, to make parlay, to smash into time fear-ducts squirting and blood gushing apotheosis

Potential energy vomiting into kinetic embodiment to become the appearance of a being, a vehicle humming breath and blood starting a stamped number, unique identifier of self, idea of a person as wholly sacred because of irreplaceable manifestation in an arrangement of uniqueness, when rather is the opposite.

The truly glorious bombastic crunch of the universe is the commonality. The call and response is the interconnection, the linking of this tethered net of soul sinew.   The cockroach-star, crawfish-water, fern-bow, fish-whale-cow and me, the galactic sparkle-fist, twittering fingers and laughing echo, the carried torch of the octopus’ sexual tentacles slathering cupping surface distortion, innards mushy in the awkward belly of everything, a blessing of infinity strumming starlight for a chord, to hear patterns in the noise, to be rewarded for expecting the pattern, the departure and the return

The so much and the spider web sticky feet of thinking too much in the colors of bodies drinking and smoking and what is this; the streak of galactic hearts of steel and like a rolling stone, do you know how it feels to be on your own, and at the intermission I meet fifty-somethings Mark and Scott from London Ontario, and tell them about my New Orleans brother who lives in London Ontario in the snow who just spent seven weeks visiting here in my home with his Canadian wife and two-year-old daughter and is now tattooing in his new nation; Mark, Scott and me, we connect in true human awareness:

A contingent circle of faces waiting for Pearl Jam are privy to our small conversation about art, punk rock, citizenship, daughters, and beyond plastic commercialized imprint of a band coming out twenty-five years ago at the last time artists could sell records and make a living, and I tell him how my younger brother made his own label Community Records here in New Orleans and he gives the music away digitally and sells the vinyl and what people are paying for is something unable to be copied not in scientific technicality but art, and rhetorically expose what is art; what are the film makers, musicians, poets, comedians, photographers, authors, painters, dancers, sculptors, chefs, fashion designers, tattooers, architects, and teachers making, what are we making if not economic compensation; we are art and we are buying art paid for in a commerce of identification; we will pay to have some fired of measure of atomic bond that our being is not alone. 

This sea of thousands around us, are we here for the same reason; because at some point, probably over and over again we were touched personally by this art that is about to boom supersonic and just as in that is the human contract; that is to not to forget that we are connected; and with that a white woman with a literal interpretation of a third eye painted in yellow on her forehead turns around and smiles at me for the sounds coming over her ear.

The lights blur with the sun and Steve Gleason announces Pearl Jam to the stage with an electric tongue of his adopted home town and his original, the Defend, and Team and the black and white distortion of the state of love and trust.  The inside job and the body that fights to be a body in a mind that sees wife, son, hears the vibrations of kindness, inspiring and feeling unworthy of being the better man

This behavior is not unique, minding manners and the old punk speed, would you hit me? refreshing the sound of the Ramones opening for the first time I heard Eddie Vedder and crew back in 1994 with Joey’s Blitzkrieg sounding off one, two, three, four….

The do the evolution of a sardonic red Drumpf hat tossed to Eddie as he put the John Oliver joke cap on backwards or correctly depending on how one sees the universe, the scroll of the rock splintering in given to fly, Prince 1999 written in the sky, spreading arms in yoga to the Earth beaming, raising limbs, leaping, arching, pounding fists upward, unbridled, unfettered, unhitched to any human body even my own vehicle jousting exuberant, letting go in the rip of skin off chest, thrust belly up, back bent urdhva hasta to explode like a human sun in rock and shine and New Orleans, glorious New Orleans beaming in a field of humans spirits like diamonds every one of us, shining like wheat licking the sunlight within one another; wave came crashing with a fist to the jaw, deliver him wings, oh look at him now, but oh oh, high flying oh he’s flying…still gives his loves he just gives it away, some days he sees a strange spot in sky, flying, fly, oh…..fly  

New Orleans AirBnB's

In New Orleans hotels like any business generate sales tax, 4% state 5% Orleans Parish.  More importantly hotels generate hotel taxes of 9% to the state and 4% to Orleans parish.  Hotels pay an Occupancy tax of around .50 cents per room per night for small hotels and $1 for normal.  There is also a parking tax of 4% to the state and 8% to the state.  Hotels also pay licensing fees for occupancy and alcohol. 

The virtual economy of AirBnB bypasses the fundamental link between the private economy needing to operate in the infrastructure of the public economy that supports its existence.  Sure it would be great to not have to pay sales tax on what Amazon ships to your house or not pay that hotel tax and think well everybody else is doing it, what is the problem? 

One of the reasons public governments are so in debt is the gap the average person comprehends how these taxes not being paid translates to the police, fire, infrastructure, health, and education services the state provides.  The state of Louisiana is confronting the sharing economy, and the city of New Orleans and our leading industry most so with hotels.

The gentrification of neighborhoods, of putting business operations in residential zones, affecting quality of life, parking, noise, and culture is paid for under-taxed resources.  Most importantly this drives up rents in a city desperate for affordable housing.  This also hinders the traditional hotels that support a significant number of jobs in the hospitality industry in New Orleans. 

This has to change.  Tax laws need to apply equally.  Safety and health regulations, licensing, and zoning laws need to apply equally.  The sad part is what New Orleanians making a few thousand untaxed dollars a year selling out the other side of a shotgun home think is cheap, costs the economy and the state and city we live in far more than most realize.  According to federal tax laws you can rent your home out for untaxed profit as long as it is less than two weeks in a calendar year.  This isn’t just a Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest thing.  This is a fundamental shift in total housing use and the rules need to adapt for a digital paradigm. 

Marble Bag - 20160421

Breath-weight of January sixth cars smashing bodies and metal
Rejoinders of angles and vertexes the mathematics of comas and back aches
Red lights and trolls under bridges reaching out and smashing people you love
Alive like guzzled chevon hanging on in the mouth waiting for that slip of sunset

To let go like a rabbit hole that keeps tunneling into a labyrinth
Of what to do now on Thursday nights stacked for Good Fridays
Planned out for this tossed lot of fabric in the process of being stitched
The sewn papyrus of lovers weaving stories of nomadic normality

Of Palestine yoked Lebanese Jesus bumping Brooklyn and New Orleans
Like cell mates to be locked in this circle pit mosaic ridge-stones and fired bricks
Round, walling oneself in to see properties on streets like eye-candy
In the art of the deal, to make this fabric hold time in a net

To quell the fabric of what it means to be amassing decades on a second hand of fingers
That this thumb knows what heartbreak is because of the five sunk in the other palm
But now the knuckle has been pruned like a cat claw, thrown outside and asked
To fend with a stump bleeding poetry and cannabis numb-tongue recollecting

Seduction by an aunt to marijuana at twenty-two while reading the Bible
Fend-off Catholic asceticism to toke into a dragon’s maw
Sit inside and let the saliva germinate what a poet is supposed to be
Breathing

The stoicism-imprint of an older sibling accountant shell forming like a clay soldier
Around limbs and caked torso, burn off the hardening mud
In the blue notes of Miles Davis and the spirit of Coltrane
Humming the flower dance of the Agapanthia pustulifera finding home

On a park bench with Charles Mingus shedding the long horned beetle for a body as a vehicle
Rounding the block twice because nobody told him about the parking spot
That the ride ends here, interjecting room for pardon, for movement
And all there is an engine attempting to fire, yet stilled in this night

To imbibe to consider a waistline, filming numbers of inspiration offered
Of what poetry does for living beings to allow spirit to cast weight from the load
Hauled by these vehicles, to move more freely in the arms of a lover
Like moonstruck mist wafting in the breath of bedrooms

Hearing the sounds of neighbors and the repossession man pounding the walls
Siblings of demand dictating to a pair about identity politics, garbage cans that need taking out, and the trumpeter’s call when the Saints of New Orleans march
The skin rubbed by a thumb in circles of grief wider and narrowing non-symmetrical
The way god shakes the marble bag   

What is your money?

This seems like a basic question, but in economic systems there is an attachment to work effort and compensation that is loose and not all together correlated to productive value.  Most humanity’s greatest difficulties occur in the dysfunctional attachment of over or under reward for productive value to work effort.  The massive aggregation of wealth in the hands of the upper one tenth of one percent and the massive percent of the poor holding zero to less than one percent of the world’s capital wealth is the result.

The oligarchic form of capitalism utilized by modern global economic markets associates reported financial statement net income as earned.  In the American iterations of reporting either a 10K for a public company or an audited private financial statement flowing into a K1 for a partner in an S corporation or a W2 for a salaried professional, the output of take home pay is considered sanctified by the system.  What was actually earned per the productive value provided and to what backdrop is that productive value measured? 

The payment stream is determined by a negotiation between the firm and the payee.  The power of the payee to determine that payment stream descends from owner to minimum wage laborer.  Economies function with both a private and a public sector.  These two components are interdependent.  In today’s global economy the operational domain of private firms has crossed public sectors seeking a lowest denominator for labor costs and taxation rates.

Without assurances for floors on the bottom end for labor or taxation rates on the top end to correct or guard, we risk public economies becoming unsustainable to sustain the private economies that operate inside it.  Both the public and private economies fail.  That is what the Great Depression was.  The 2008 market crash was a precursor to where the global economy is probably heading nearing 2022.  There must be balance.

Owners of private firms determine how much profit to extract from the companies they own.  Traditionally the profit formula is to keep employees desperate in order to accept the lowest wages possible, to put as many personal expenses through the company to reduce income taxation as possible to serve as tax free compensation, and to pay yourself while you can.  For publically traded companies, management does the same, but diffuses the personal nature of perks as systemic normality.  Executives prioritize short term profits rather than long term corporate sustainability because they are highly influenced by stock based compensation.  If capital gains become personal in the next quarter or year rather than what is good for the private firm and to a degree the public economy over the course of the long term, both sides of the economy fail.

So what is your money?  What if you are over or under paid?  What if a firm pays you as little as possible not because your productive value is not greater to the profitability of the entity but that the system has disempowered an entire labor class and externalized the full employment cost of health, retirement, and child care of being a member of public society to be borne by the public economy?  The costs of being a human must be paid by the summation of the private and public economies.  To claim an imaginary mezzanine where a human is expected to labor but not eat or be housed or find healthcare, to die as a disposable worker ant reduces the investment in the average laborer to that lowest denominator.  Furthermore that denominator is false.  Unless we are in some Atlas Shrugged fantasy world, where humans are left to die in the street, starving, and sick by the millions due to the negligent extortion of the job creator class, the public economy subsidizes this denominator.  Is this what we want as a species?  

The recourse is to first change the false capitalist perspective that the number a person is paid in a W2 or a K1 is representative of their productive value added to society.  These decisions are made on biases which are both ego driven and systematic based on the power provided to those who have accumulated wealth.  Much of that wealth is generational and falsely connoting power to those who never did anything but win the genetic lottery and extend a lead in a biological relay race.  To a degree the repression of this reality is a primary factor in the existence of systematic racism. 

Once this perspective is changed, the global society of governments representing the public economies that global firms in the private sector operate must work to implement global based taxes on capital to the stockholders based on proportional tax rates based on the citizenship of employees based on reported compensation.  What this would mean is that a global tax on capital held on the balance sheet of the firm would occur and be allocated based on the reported earnings by individual to a single country based on that individual’s primary chosen citizenship.  In the event of dual citizenship there would have to be one elected for everyone under a certain earnings number and an audited one for those over a certain earnings level.  The capital tax rates would be set by individual countries.  The tax would then go back to the applicable countries.

The same could be done on a citizen level based on reported citizenship for investments and total wealth owned.  If the world does not start taxing capital more, taxes on income alone even if adapted for those dodging countries will never catch up in time to avoid the impending depression and risk of inflation. 

The average person knows there is something wrong.  Trump and Sanders are evidence.   When the owner or upper management of a company is dining out at $200 lunches and a daily worker is packing a bologna sandwich that is one level of disparity.  When the owner is given every advantage to lower taxable income and externalize the living wage of a laborer to the public sector that is also underfunded because of those tax advantages that is another.  Today we have both.    

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Approaching Forty, a Love Letter : Esoerotica

I undulate in hypothetical assertion on if we have met, passed, or spoken.  Although possible whether I wish this instigation to be present in tangible reality I am bewitched on what side of the seesaw of hope the impetus would fall: hopeful or less.  This being the nature of the mind preoccupied with what is beyond control bearing meaning on this present moment, where I am most assured I am clueless as to your whereabouts, aroma, or eccentric peculiarities and why when we do ignite this brushfire it will blaze triumphant in that undaunted form of presence.  

Mercurial laughter a gas of intoxicating waft as once I begin to smile at you there is that notion of how can you help yourself but reciprocate into a widening, an opening to what is offered as if natural and rambunctiously combustible into laughter, wanton debaucheries of wildfire laughter seeping into complexion and sexual frivolity tickling the dermis to percolate as this is the moment.  This is lightning like liquid sky plasma arcing into the spirituality of dragon heartstring wands making magic in the way one human peers into the eyes of another.  This is saying I and you know there is no one, no perfect, no only, but we might be able to treat each other as if that were true, priority not in some worship of sexual monogamy equals success preached by the ego, but love is free choice made in so many complex tendrils and divots and not the truncation of carnal desire encapsulated in a single physical body.  We can fuck in fervent abandon and entwine stories until dawn sewing cloth for winters and dancing nude in springs.  There is a staying warm and being free, security and liberation in duality, this is the grand parade.

There is the mother of woven blanket hopes in the paradigms of fate, karma, faith, and the nurturing fertilizers of kindness, dreaming, and planted seeds that a moment of burgeoning like this could ever be.  There is the father of my rigid metal armor that stoically metastasizes my bronchiole cells into cancerous heaviness to lift the bagpipes of body to breathe the audacity to hope for such planetary alignments.  There is the child in me toying that seesaw inside the lightness and the heaviness for which man to be and I pray your eyes find the feathered truth and taste my body naked. 

I recollect a quartet of women who taught me how to be a lover, the others like nibbling minnows, but these women were the tarpon and swordfish, the majestic surface bursting bullheaded beauties capable of making this body rethink where he wanted to go, who he wanted to be, formational type of scale issues where after I was a molted sun-organism evolving out of the water, processing how to breath the staggering notion of air welled inside another’s lungs.  Falling brilliantly and yet, here writing this love letter to you like the Old Man and the Sea, Ahab and Thoreau in his garden seeing this natural eruption fracture the lines of what I expect to become, not knowing if I will be destroyed, saved, or enraptured, I am trying to picture your face as I have a thousand times before in gray percolated midnights.

I speak to you over the lid of my pillow in the sterile darkness holding courtship in conversation under the guise that one day we may pass out from behind the veil into identities; that you had to complete some lily-pad tie-toe, mud-slop stomp, fire-pit dash as I have to be in a specific moment of encounter.  That no matter how the mirror fissures into the warmest refracted colors that this sail cloth inside me is filled by that notion that brought Odysseus home.  Maybe it is to madness or crestfallen umbrage in the way the die will be cast, but there is unction in those twilight conversations echoing that maybe there will be time.  Maybe there will be time for you and me.  Not for perfection, but for being, simply being.    

This battery of barracudas cannot peck all my flesh.  Hair is a nest of gray.  Sex is tantric and shared, but I know none of it has been you.  I am not sure if I have ever felt reciprocated love.  I think I am getting closer to forty years old, which if I am blessed may be half. 

One of my greatest inspirations to learn how to write was a teacher who gave me a 1992 USA hockey team puck as a Senior Awards Breakfast trophy for my contributions to our creative writing class.  I keep it on my desk.  He taught me about Kenneth Patchen and Alan Ginsberg.  He was divorced and the brutality of it puffed out in his cigarettes while on yard duty.  He remarried in his fifties, was in love and I went to see him play Dylan songs at the Neutral Ground on Danneel Street.  She got a brain aneurysm, died on him like a shark swallowing her end of the row boat.  He had a few years and was back to that nothing.  I remember going over to his house in my college years, the lights low and he offered apple pie out the fridge.  It was cold and firm and I had high school-nothing to say to the man.  He died of cancer a month after my wife walked out on our family.  I was thirty, his funeral and I could not face being dumbstruck again. 

Love can be a god damn son of a bitch.  Everybody has their briars and ponds with ice too thin to skate, but we try.  We slide the puck and we fall and like some kind of American god maybe there is a dark secret at the bottom of that lake we just can’t face, but maybe when I talk to you when I peer into those waters, maybe I can see love, to feel on par, to have my person to swim with, to crack my fist against that ice, tread out that water, inhale that great big blasphemous breath, look you in eyes, and finally know what to say.