Organic Accounts

An economy is a living organism

The stagnant waters are breeding algae, not lethargic, but desperate

For the oxygen has been strained into a cult of consolidation

Where the nearest star is ever more eclipsed by the height

Of the mounds of wealth sleeping in banks rising like eponymous elephant hills

Bearing lessons for the reluctant orators shuffling subsidized soybean and corn

At drive-through counter conversations via hands-free head-sets

For hygienically paper-wrapped plastic straws stuffed into golden-arch bags

A man owns a hotel

Breaks a bit above-even on-paper

Revenue ten million, expenses nine point ninety-nine million

What has he accomplished?

A gumbo pot starts with the roux

Fire, flour, oil, time

Thickening into the trinity of onions, bell pepper, and celery

Mixed with stock to drench either chicken-Andouille or shrimp-crab-oyster

Okra, cayenne, bay leaves, soaked with the bones and shells

The herbs to the tongue to make a winter’s grip slip into empathetic steam

Rising from bowl into the mouths of a family around a table

Spoons, bellies, and bath before bedtime for school in the morn

Mother to change the sheets of city visitors on convention

Father to drive a taxi

Children bundled up and hoping the fights in the yard don’t get too close

Just want to have a little time for recess before attending to the common core

A man does not build a hotel

Funds on sequester

An investment account for market return percentages

I think I will keep the difference

Open the shores of Mexico and Brazil to the mountains of China and Tennessee

There goes the average labor rate spread across the lowest common denominator

Rice and beans, farms and concrete, Woody Guthrie’s singing about heavy loads

In the dust rolling in stomach’s and okra brought on African produce ships

Productive value paid an official taxable wage to smile at freedom

Fountain pens and hand guns, marijuana and cotton

Foxconn and Fox news; Roger Ailes and hammering nails

Organic vegetables and a world pond

Syphoning off into a bathtub drain at the spa

Permission to be Happy

You would not let me go

You fought for us and with that the ice shattered

This permission I have been pursuing inside my volition

To love you

Fissured into a sightline in a current of your demand

That I was not negligible to your happiness

I was able to visualize the permanence you see in me

Stubborn to my skeleton

I asked for stillness

You gave me stability of comfort

Tell me you want me and you said

You wish to spend your forever by my side

The winter in my heart has thawed and I am ecstatic

Tempered in my robust enthusiasm, but pouring like a war of water

I could never combat the river’s solidity

I have waited for my spring for five years

I am flowing and I see your beautiful face as harbor

Praying in glances of common bond 

To see the seed of life come full circle

In the darkest before the dawn

I crumbled into an elixir of fear apt to sip the draught of death

Your faith in life’s bloom has let the glass slip from my cancerous fingers

The deadness is wandering to evaporation for other clouds,

But this morn I am smelling ambrosia in your embrace

This balance that I am not replaceable

Nor numbered in a fraction of forgetfulness

Has shook me to the crucible of my humanity

The chemistry of humble love registering has ensnared me in your meekness

I am breaking into sonic reverberation as the universe tolls

Let us be a family

You and me; balancing the alone inside the love

That I can be the full encompassing self I have always

And that is the man you love

I have never gone a day when I did not root for us behind my spider webs

I am drawn to you

You, me, daylight, midnight, roads, let’s roll!

For so long I saw peril in happiness; the risk of the stinger in looks

And in you I have given myself permission to be happy

Drinks on the Porch

Unquenchable sadness

Tastes like anger

When you ask God for a drink

The ripples on the surface fade

Into the stillness of November

Approaching another round

So that the evergreen sheds numb

As trees are dragged to the curb

Like closets rattling cedar hangers hollow

Questions stacked like coffee cakes

Stale and cockroach eggs for sugar sprinkles

Teaspoons scoop the cardiovascular nugget

Into summer rebounding like a concussion

From the player’s skull against the field

Sleeping is vertigo and all the skirts sway like death

Halo’s in the bar lights of iPhone illuminated cheeks

Kid in a doll house; adults in the theater

Treasure was a jester scepter, nothing to be but eyeballs

Glancing out at apparitions for the substitutions

Of wanting not and feeding nil for the inertia to hope

For legs that move beyond the blown off

Napalm and eggnog, lace cookies for the eunuch playoffs  

Glad to be ousted seeing the man hang her ornaments

The boy in his arms that has her eyes

The girl that lives across the hall from the boy that has mine

Jumbled jungle and the farm got too close, back mouse to the city 

Before the cheese jams his throat

Learning to sip and talk to a new bartender

Paid for beyond the tithe

Afraid of abandoning the silence, but it might be time

Getting into the Cab

It is you and me together.

Family

If you let go I will die.

If you understand we will dance

If not let me starve here fending bone for blood

I can partition no marrow

There is a living body or a corpse

And your body will end me to either horizon

Horizontal or vertical

The babies need a father and I intend to be the man,

Neither of us can waver as the shaft may bend

The wheat remains rooted

The weeds we will stamp

Fuck them.  I pick you.   Let’s go!

I am not able to endure another loss

So I will play as if termination is not an option

I know I will perish on the spot

If I am ever privy to the end,

I will drink, inject, vomit, sleep, crash!

The ugliness will have no mirror

Only ashen cremated laughter

So parry the blow, jungle love to shake the coconuts

Pebbles for the banker and wood to warm the chimney

If we could leave Jesus at the cab stand and just see God

I would be in heaven instead of cock blocked.

Most marriages have men before the man

Women before the woman

Ghosts in the machine campaigning for fear over love 

Let’s not pay attention and see if we can get these skeletons upstairs

Write where I want to Be 2014

You make me write where I want to be

As if the notion to pray was still in me

To see the passage of god like fingertips

Dabbling through the nuance of coincidence

For the gamblers who empower purpose past the blades of volition

Slashing from veteran tongues and novice breaths

Daring for a chocolate cone on Venice Beach as the horizon

Slurps the impossible orange cattle cade egg drop soup

Into oblivion’s haughty gurgle

You make me aspire that chocolate was palatable

To make life sweetly nuzzle past a prayer-view porch

Climb Abram’s bridge and read in the undulation

I kiss you and see this life un-dragged, questions muddled

Into the eyes of children knowing a mother loving a father

Requited into a man on a hill proud and tethered to love

From a junkyard crowned with a nation of pauper’s decadence

Singing to sleep, “It’s all right.  It’s all right.  Baby It’s all right.”

Something like prayer

I believe in god, I imagine from my readings, the way in which Einstein believed in god.  The atomic force that holds protons and electrons, draws the opposite, repulses the same.  Neutrons traverse freely, hide and convert into protons in guilds.  This ballet in the bellies of stars and the cosmos, in our bodies and planets of hitchhiking atoms is the godliest exchange I know.

Outside of dubbing the theater of science awe inspiring grandeur as the closest approximation of a representation of what humans may in part label god, I am by declaration an atheist.  I am not pantheist where the universe is god, but that we are temporary illusions of segmented universe.  The universe is.  There are no partitions.  What has always, is, and will be are atoms dancing in boundless space time.

The periodic table is like a Wall Street market to parlay the essence of reality.  The force that bonds, repels, and attracts the components of the multiverse on its scales, this is spirituality; this is religion; this is awe.  Not to be worshiped, but to sense our presence in it as witness.  We play beyond time, beyond death, beyond individuality in the oneness.  We evolve beyond comprehension of what we were, are and will be made, build, deconstruct and exist in a transient atomic transposition that goes on before our gestation, during and after our respiration, and dances in eternity. 

Death becomes a fork in the road not determined by the fulcrum of volition to elect the path to proceed to in some illusion of heaven or perdition, but for the bounty or detriment we impart to the panoply of genial life remaining to pick up the torch to enlighten or expedite extinction with the processed knowledge we leave as seed.  The collective universe is guided by an improbability measured in the interconnection of fundamental forces; gravitational, electromagnetic, and the grand nuclear.

The beauty of a quark belies humanity into representing our cranial complexity as superior or life span as a determination of value.  Paramecium, sulfur, plasma, human, fish, alien microbe, we are all stardust vomited into rearrangement.  How godly!  How miniscule the trade of love and fear of demanding or relinquishing the need for definitive conclusion.  In the absence of evidence probability is not fifty-fifty.  Going with a no for now, open to further evidence, demanding none, is an atheist’s peace to the godly atom.  

Love, peace, we are all interconnected. 

The Minimum Wage

Doing what I do I am privy to industry messages inside the business community.  This one comes from the National Restaurant Association, not the gun enthusiasts.

Survey says...

NRA poll: Wage increase not the best way to reduce poverty A federal minimum wage increase ranks a distant third, behind post-secondary education and job training opportunities, as a factor that stands to significantly reduce poverty in the United States, according to the results of a recent National Restaurant Association poll. Three of four respondents said ensuring that more young people complete high school and have an opportunity to acquire some form of post-secondary education would have a very significant impact (49%) or fairly significant impact (20%) on reducing poverty in the U.S. The poll, conducted in late January by ORC International on behalf of the NRA, asked 1,003 adults for their opinion on whether three factors—increasing the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, ensuring that more young people finish high school and have an opportunity to acquire post-secondary education, and providing more opportunities for job training for the unemployed and under-employed—would have a significant, fairly significant, or somewhat of an impact on reducing poverty. Read more. Tell Congress that increasing the federal minimum wage will reduce jobs, not poverty.

My drop in a bucket comments:  Off course the NRA wants to oppose any increase in the minimum wage.  The giant corporations that run the spew of fast food and homogenized dining experiences at every interstate exit use the federal minimum wage as the forced maximum they have to unfortunately relinquish for the disposable humans that wash dishes, tote plates, heat chicken, and flow consumer cattle through table tops with touch screens.  The minimum wage is a restrictive check and balance that exists because without it disposable humans will accept a nickel a day over nothing in times of economic desperation.

This poll starts with a false economic premise.  It juxtaposes the idea that the waiter, line cook, or clean up artist is some current student or drop out and that higher education would resolve the toil.  It does not address the reality that humans require a spectrum of low, moderate, and high wage compensation variables for our macroeconomic equation to balance.  Right now it does not balance.  The major reason it does not is because the top end hoards the preponderance through dividends, high-end management compensation, and an escalation of commitment compensation routine where those getting paid millions begin to over-associate their contribution to the business’s profit.  (I.e.  I paid out this bonus to me, we’re making money.  If I left the profit would go away.  I am an indispensable human. )

To do this the minimum wagers in third world and in the United States become blank-faced replaceable bodies to churn the factory whether it be a restaurant or Wal-Mart.  This is why the minimum wage is so crucial.  The minimum wage is the reluctant share given for a unit of cog-labor in America.  The country’s political lobbying groups will repress this wage as long as possible. 

This is why we see statistics about job loss and how the money the increased minimum wage “costs” would be better spent elsewhere.   Some humans have an intelligence quotient or a desire where minimum wage is all they can or will do in this life.  The minimum wage means if a firm could pay you less it would.  Applying a theoretical college degree to this population is a false solution to a full economic spectrum reality. 

Most min-wage workers are adults, parents, family providers and the percentage is growing, not declining.  The economy is us as a nation, not the stock market.  When compensation is diverted from the firm owners to the bottom rung, even in such tiny amounts as the minimum wage, that money gets circulated in our economy at a much higher rate than as a stock dividend.  That helps the federal treasury and creates consumer spending, which is the number one driver of a healthy economy.  Increased minimum wage workers have a better shot at home ownership, automobile ownership, lowering financing charges and other fundamental variables that can assist in elevating humans into the middle class. 

The idea that firms will cut people because the minimum wage increases requires the precursor question: what are the profits of that company?  What do the 10K's say?  Where do those profits go to?

Look at the stock market, look at the lines of industries opposing the minimum wage and you will begin to understand why increasing the minimum wage to a reasonable amount around $10 an hour is vital, healthy and a major step in our economic recovery.