Incestuous Debt

Incestuous Debt 

Temperature sixteen degrees below in January 2013

The reckoning of the iceberg that ripped the hull

Choices to a $16.2 trillion dollar federal deficit

Untold state and local government debts, GASB 54 incestuous  

The only solutions are stone cold

To go out in the blizzard, barehanded and grip

Artificial estimates preaching the consequences of the fiscal cliff

Like an apocalyptic infomercial for politicians  

Americans can see the intransigence on the drive-through theater in our skulls

Democrats impart keep the rates for those under $250,000, raise those above

Republicans keep for everybody, but where are the cuts? 

The military, the social services, the student loans, the sick?

The bureaucrats, the entitlements, the retirees, the lists? 

Of untold mandates, promises, retroactive must do’s

Political Action Committees, lobbyists and ticker symbols, food

Reality is this is going to hurt, there is no easy winnable

Resolution wading in the harbor, no magic carrot or hat  

To Pull an “it” out and use, austerity whispered on the life raft

The truth is these 2001 and 2003 rates, have been tolling up the deficit

Because the simultaneous spending has been digging this grave

Two wars, repressed interest rates, section-179, stimulated tax breaks 

We ate too much at the buffet America, but we are paying by the pound

Greece, Eurozone what is the sign of our demise,

Mayan Apocalypse of greed someone’s God cries 

The truth is an algorithm, simply put math, will legislators stay after class?

For variables, exponents, growth rates, the economy is going to shrink

It cannot find victory in both, you see the debt was a stimulus

To pull the future into the past, well the tipping point is the present now  

The binge drinking must cease, the carcass the bone, vegetables less meat

Conflagration on spending burn the system to the soil,

Rethink with digital technologies to encompass a complete society embroiled

In one fight, not us and them, health care is not ancillary, but I would beg to question war 

Drone strikes or human rights, Gittmo or Gung-Ho, Michael Keaton car plants  

Global economy and Marijuana crimes into taxable common sense

If you are bound to believe raising tax rates on the upper-crust, reduces growth rates causing the rust on the belt of America, well I ask you to encompass the greater picture

The debt for the country that those taxes go to pay, the interest on interest

And the bond rating decay; look at those side panels of humans that purchase the goods

 

Sold from the ticker-symbols shaking from Santa-Claus’ beard or

Intercepting Red Riding Hood in the woods

You are living in a fantasy land of skeletons misunderstood

As if these bodies run bare will still bleed you flesh 

Consumer spending is the driver and what meat have we left?

This debt is incestuous it mixes and spills into every home and cavern

Of this nation we have built; yes we built it together

When Obama said it that is what he meant  

Not just you on the top, haughty and pent on maneuvering every tax law

Every loop hole and technicality to create a stalactite of wealth

Hardened on the economic ceiling to become normality

And what we need now are stone-cold choices to accept and better this reality 

Recession, recession that is where we probably must go

Sometimes we must prune the plant for the results to show up next spring after the snow

Fiscal cliff expectations tax increases pay down but a crumb $774 billion in 2013

But at least the tide ain’t going up; economy contract then expand; it is the only way out 

Take your medicine or be like the Greeks or the Romans and

Watch our empire burn down

This is not Romney; this is not Obama or Repubicrat or Democran

This is you and I with a will in our hands; to see mathematics and history  

With a clear transparent lens, to see the gambler’s dilemma of the Dow

To see government defined benefit pensions of the states,

To see Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, that Are NOT EVEN

In the $sixteen point two trillion, as if numbers were rainbows 

And we could just wash the colors into black

There is no pot of gold to get our fiscal sanity back

Only grease and work, toil and community, the first step is congress to end the lunacy 

 

So when you look at your W2,

Don’t blame the welfare queens or the giant corporations alone

This is us all with our heads in a hole; fearful defecating wars

Terror, drugs, we know what has to stop, the solution is in the synthesis  

Self-aggrandizing, read my book, or take a look; see an idea, and melt the ice to put

Warmth on the table, to come home and be able; to get us out this frozen ocean

Morning After

Morning After, (sounds in the office sitting at my desk typing 8:30 a.m.)

Came into work this morning

Sixty-plus receptionist Bible thumper from Livingston Parish, Louisiana

On the phone with presumed acquaintance rather than client 

“The only people who voted for him,

Getting money, not working”

Murmurs from other speaker

“That was Katrina wasn’t it?  What are they thinking?” 

Boss, yesterday to me,

“We’ll see tomorrow if we still have to worry about this healthcare thing.”

“Everybody is going to go out of business, can’t afford the taxes.” 
Me, under-the-radar silence, picture of Louis Armstrong on my wall
I kept typing at my keyboard on a spreadsheet

Soccer mom staffer, today to a manger

“I told my husband, where do you want to move to?"

“At least one thing Louisiana helped our gun laws.  So if there is a revolution, you know”

“Or we can now go to Colorado or Washington and get high and just not worry about it.” 

Secretary keeps chatting,

“I prayed.  I’m praying.”

Manager to Soccer Mom,
"I was elk hunting up in Colorado last month.  There were signs everywhere.
We stopped for gas, two, three times, guys said, 'Vote Romney. Vote Romney'"
"Look at land mass.  Look at all the states, only one, three votes each.
Somthing's wrong. You can't tell me they should have that many more."

Conversation trails into
"I know this guy.  He was twenty-five years old.  He has six kids.
"You get so much per kid."
"'Weed grows out of the ground.  It's an herb,' says Colorado Governor"
Both giggle

Nobody stopped by my office to talk.

Election Night Thoughts 11/7/2012

The trending influx of a more non-white male demographic profile to the electorate correlated with the explosion of digital information to fact check erroneous mathematics to beguile the masses under the cult of faulty macroeconomic policies should cause a reckoning within the Republican Party.  

The 2012 red-state presidential campaign portrayed an arrogance to not only ignore the core social issues of those demographics by living inside a bubble, but anesthetized itself into believing that intransigent congressional policies to sabotage the incumbent would go unnoticed.   

Escalating a commitment away from access to health care, women’s rights, marriage equality, pathways to citizenship, and basic economic level playing fields imprinted a stark contrast in the America outside the land not dominated by tractors, rifles, and pews.  

The pull towards science, math, environmental consciousness, and global economic strategies, and quite frankly the decreased reliance on religion as a political crutch, will proliferate as web-based mediums disseminate free-thinking to a greater portion of the population independent of income.  

The Republican party of Lincoln no longer exists.  I hope for America’s sake that the party cuts ties from the pact it has made with Grover Norquist and the Tea Party to see past the politics of isolation, blame and obstructionism that have led to tonight in order to capture the best ideals of Lincoln; individual freedom based in facts, math, truth and equality.

My best hope is that we have strong political thinkers in Washington who can tackle these issues, and maybe tonight America’s rebuttal to the traffic jam of a sixty member filibuster Senate and do-nothing House will have a chance at doing just that.  Peace, Love, We are all interconnected. 

An Excerpt from Chapter Eight: A Lonestar Education

265

My biggest male-stress was our house and coordinating with our realtor and contractors to try get the house on market and sold.  Selling the house represented the pass-card to progression.  The sale had to occur before the rental house and our old mortgage’s grip could thrust that Atlas-weight back into the ocean from which Katrina came.   

Our realtor had an abundance of homes to sell.  Most of which were customers much closer to the city than we were.  Despite the apparent dearth of housing in the city, getting that house sold was like trying to sell water to a blind Romanian gypsy lost in the desert.  You know she probably needed the drink, but nothing was normal or trustworthy about the situation.  

I remember going to work in Dallas on Mardi Gras Day, like it was just a Tuesday.  It was the first time in my life I was not off from school or work.  Nobody else in the office even noticed.  The storm mocked in subtle kidnappings.   

It was like the storm transplanted our whole life into this flotsam wreckage jettisoned to a transient wayside to rot in a mire of a minority-percentage choice.  The choice had to be owned as an anchor to the landscape of redefined daily tasks.  The people we spoke with, the food purveyors, the refueling stations were now by-default alterations.  No Tastee Kastleburgers!  No Manda andouille for gumbo!  No Danny & Clydes Leidenheimer bread Chisesi Ham po-boy!  No Hubig’s pies!  No Bud’s Broiler number four with the sauce and no god-dam mother-fucking Haydel’s King Cake!   

In the macro-level devastation, the remaining local survivors huddled down in NOLA had to relinquish the entitlement of complaint.  In every urge to extol a release of tension to a sympathetic ear, all anyone could find were qualifying empathetic ones.  Any who could listen were also corrupted by the stale wrath of nature and man.   

Was our humanity corroded and purged by the flood?  External smiles showed luminous.  Jovial retorts aired, but inside home was gone or at minimum disfigured like acid sprayed on exposed flesh.  History was mutated in the dichotomy of war with a life we compressed the gall to declare we deserved in private conversations with the Lord.   

We were alive in this flooded wasteland.  Every joy was precious.  Our challenge in the driftwood strand was to let these doppelganger former selves that we could have been, keep washing by.  “Do not grasp their hands.  Their fingers are dark leaches draining any future with tainted hopes no longer feasible in this altered beyond-Thunderdome future that demands our attention.  Let them drown, so we can filter the oxygen through these fetid breaths.”  New Orleanians could only hold what could fit in our hands as we scavenged in the debris; so we grabbed our culture tight.

I started to realize more of the unsalvageable possessions.  Mr. Roberts’ Mont Blanc pen was missing.  Pre-digital family photos were gone including this book from our wedding that got smeared in the water. 

Ashley changed jobs after her daddy-figure boss was too big a failure.  Ashley got a job doing tax work for a wealth management company that handled individuals with over twenty-five million dollars.  Translated that is, she worked as part of a team of professionals to reduce the taxes of the moderately-mega wealthy as much as possible.  Some rich guy saw he needed a crew just to handle how much money he had, (accountants, lawyers, financial analysts, and bankers), so the guy made more money by starting a company with his team to help other rich people like him keep the government away from their money.   

(This is how the spectrum of disparity of wealth is maintained.  Such machines perpetuate the perception of living individuals requiring respiration, the consumption of water and food, fecal excretion and a domicile to avoid the savages of nature to imprint upon their own self-view an enhanced upward mobility that is not only capable of being obtained, but an achievement of past fact.  For the very concept of the threshold of monetary wealth required to foster prosperity in one bucket is a pittance compared to the threshold to constitute moderate wealth in another.   

The great magic act is beguiling a man to misunderstand the comparative size of his own bucket, while adding a lesser measure to his own than he does to another; in the sense that the ounce he adds to his own is below the threshold of necessity for daily repetition of respiration, the consumption of water and food, fecal excretion and a domicile to avoid the savages of nature, while the measure he adds to the other is above similar thresholds.  One is obtaining necessity, the other excess. 

These twenty-five million dollar buckets contrast with a Texas school teacher, an Indonesian miner, a New Jersey bus driver, a Parisian nurse, or the geographically independent chief executive officer of Pfizer.  Imagine the volume of contents like water spilling upon a floor the size of Tanzania, prompting the burgeoning of life like a Serengeti flood.  If the smaller buckets spill, a few weeds or bushes may sprout.  If the largest buckets spill; a great deluge will ensue, drowning animals and grasslands in a chaotic melee.  The entire system will die in excess.  So it is we must balance the supply exiting. 

This water is not like water on earth; energetic wealth is not finite, the quantity is not a zero sum.  The amount can be nothing or a raging fire depending on the choice of individuals.  However when the largest buckets, release such a minimal liquidity in comparison to the consolidated abundance, the concept of a moderate bucket becomes skewed.  What is the top two percent of wealth and what is the bottom two percent of humans separate in such a variance that these statistical strata become alien species, of perceived divergent needs, despite completing the daily repetition of respiration, the consumption of water and food, fecal excretion and a domicile to avoid the savages of nature. 

These traits: the acts of breathing, eating, shitting, drinking, and sleeping, become so distant in one and all the more intimate in the other.  The priority system of processes leaves us focused on our disconnection as if one is climbing a great building admiring the view; the other is drowning in a great ocean.  Each is blinded by the sun, shinning above both by an immaterial difference in the universal scheme.  One sees the rays reflected off the water incapable of seeing any floating bodies.  One sees the rays cascading into his direct vision causing any attempt to see a building to produce black flecks upon his retina or the haze of clouds wafting kilometers below where Jack’s beanstalk reaches its canopy.   

So you see, it is what we so often can not see; that is the perception of who we are in comparison and in common that blinds us.  This is how it is that once one is on the thirteenth floor of the building; it is all the more easy to get to the thirtieth; and so on the five-hundredth to get to the thousandth.  So once one begins in the basement, how is one to see the street, to knock on the door?  The difficulty exponentially increases lower to the planet; it mirrors gravity in this way.  However we must see an inverse gravity operating in a duality; for gravity functions based on mass, not a planetary core.  One mass is human bodies; one is a cluster of bank vaults; clouds and roots; each tearing away at a middle. 

For surely some measure of men must occupy each floor, each purpose, supplying the work to achieve such climbs.  We can not have nations of flatness in a squalor of industry devoid of standing structures.  It is in this balance we find our societal conundrum; it is in this balance that we eternally vibrate, primarily stationary, yet constantly pulled by the gravity of either end of the spectrum.) 

So it was, each my wife and I found ourselves employed; doing work adding to buckets.  God bless America.  Life was more sanitary, but everyday was a synthetic step. 

Drops to the Forest Floor

Drops to the Forest Floor 

Rheum build up, mucus crusted to the corners of eyelids

Power out, hurricane came through during the night

Stripped the lines, battery back-up failed, garage door stagnant

Manual exertion depleted to the quagmire of depression  

Resigned to the forecast, the precognition of reparations possible

In the pitter-pat of hours dangling like parachute rip chords

In the precipitation from the sky praying for hands to reach

In indignant rebellion to dare grip liquid into solid  

As if the smatter of sliding hope were not destined for a puddle

To collect and evaporate to dangle about the clouds in the morrow

To entreat for a repetitive cycle of dissonance over angelic benediction

The act of faith is the kindled fire as flint in the storm  

Hands stretch, again stretch, reach, stretch, wetter and wetter still

Eyes exhaust and the dampness, the humidity is blinding

The dank in the dark lambasts the stark honest criticism of science

Stages of matter coagulated by a belief system based on anomalies  

Get up, knocked down, get up, knocked down, get up, stay

The cycle of resigned dignity is folded into an envelope

Mailed to one’s self at the eleventh hour as a reminder to assure

What was, will endure like the boulder for Sisyphus 

So in the throngs of this depression what chisel does one bear?

What flint; what lung to swallow this exhaust that

Like a fern perpetuates in the dim floor to convert

Carbon into oxygen, that which saves me, kills you 

And therefore in this form I will take it away to assure your safety

Do the same, but do not forget my existence. 

Do not stamp me from this entangled symbiosis

In all this blackness reach to me with the nude exchange of breath

And I will repay you 

In the shadow-lands of canopy suppression, I exhale the honest

Weapon against this encompassing fear-filled depression

Remember, “Do good.  Simply, do good sir.”   

Repay into the folds of leaves the remembrance of that

Which was not mandated by the law, but was done by exhaling the toxins

Inside one’s self, to be the genesis of respiration into a foreign other. 

This is how all great things begin. 

When you see the bank account dwindle

When you see the townsfolk gather their pitchforks

When you see the desperation of a whiskey bottle

When you see the solitary confinement of the digital universe  

Wrap your mind into a casket of encumbered normality

Fraught with the caked-on sludge eye goop we have the gall to label as sleep

As rest, as some mucus of restoration rather than complacent death

That day sir, do good  

Find a child and inspire, find a father and help his hands to work for his kin

Find a mother and listen, find an artist and respond to the arc of light that entered

Your heart when intersecting with the ray of that which she creates

Find a hammer and a nail and combat the idolatry to the cult of blame  

Be one that helps those who are pleading at rain drops

Gasping upon all solid notions of sanity that fluid must transfer into solid

That carbon must convert into oxygen despite the travesty of human lungs

Be that which permeates time to be embraced by another’s grandchild  

As the impetus as to why destitution was not an inoperable eyelid

That the hands of blood extending were gripped like buckets

To collect fuel for the horse to proceed from this outpost to that

In that good, the despair inside your own prism will crackle to unleash a spectrum  

Unbound in a rainbow bending into the nature of all things

However down, however crimpled into nothing sight

Do good in the day that you have sir, and nothing more you shall need

Oxygen will flow into you so that dopamine parades out laughter in your voice 

Shattering doubt of why, existential rationale for existence becomes folly quibble

Apparent in the deluge of joy of the amplified ability to soak in the present

These foul religions of archaic legislation segregating habitat of common species

Nevermore, bound to their courts and robed pulpits  

Inhale, exhale, and perspire in the thunderstorm

Soak in the possibility of lightning, hold the rod for the herd

Do good, and illuminate that so that even shut eyes may see

Empathy over an Oil Drum

Empathy over an Oil Drum 

In an oil drum turned jerk chicken barbeque meat

Dispense the muscle, commence the hustle

On with the rumble in the stumbles, for a leg up from the moor  

Oh, look out there the hurricane is coming to shore!

Jamaican pride death tolls minority count the lives

Not like New Yorkers two babies caught the subway for a dime

Smash the babies in the tide, no electricity for a week  

Tell me New Orleans heard your screams,

Empathy is such a gray bearded beast

Maybe now we can see the tonic salesmen for what he tries to sell

Blame in a bottle for why the world has all gone to hell  

Peddlers and smugglers I call outside the bubble

Living Olive Garden lives, pull up to the drive through and activate demise

Order for the value, all a man can eat, taking in the take-out

Cram the Styrofoam, my wife and I will eat this and have enough to moan  

My stomach is overdone, need the Pepcid AC again,

Heart is burning the news is on Amen

Oh look honey look at that, sale is on at Macy’s and we need a new litter for the cat

She likes the scent of that new one I am sure,

First world contemplations of the current flavor of poor  

Adulterating problems to gather by candle light with the neighbors share the right

To complain, to see the gas lines and the pews filling up with frustrated souls

I remember the timeframe of Katrina and the reversing rolls

Empathy is a tricky bastard sitting right aside, bust you in the head as soon as one thinks

Could have been me

Soiled

Soiled 

Nine o’clock a.m. at work, I feel the dirt encompassing my body

No casket, just a sheath of soil, dark, dank,

The worms stimulate my naked flesh with unintended contact

Eyelids still operate, but I crusted the mode like a hurricane shutter 

Peering out might gauge the depth, six or two-thousand feet

Technical respiration is at battle with function; posing the question

If one is not actively converting the oxygen in one’s blood

To purposeful action to alter the molecular configuration of the universe 

If one is choosing static, like a self-induced coma to numb to oblivion

Then the differential between inhalation and a trachea clogged with dirt

Compacted into the stomach and sinus cavity is moot 

Murmurs through the surface I can hear coworkers discuss country gossip

Hunting trips and the splendor of evolutionary camouflage

Afforded to ruminant mammals by the process of elimination

As those that failed to adapt were the first devoured by carnivores 

Cancel Christmas, call off the sales; the consumerist mob

Will have to endure the guilt of not purchasing me presents any longer

The Prozac is tempting, but like any drug dealer I am skeptical

The zenith of muted sensations still capable of registry is absence 

The dopamine deluge risks sacrificing my carcass for candy

Nothing to gnaw on here, but hippocampus vitamins soliciting a lounge act

Dance for the people monkey, prance marionette for the ticker symbol beckons

All you asked for was a confidant therapist; We are Blue Cross HMO 

We don’t fund prostitutes of discourse, not enough profit in that

Here is Wonka’s Gobstopper, now stop gobbing and start smiling

The world needs someone else to gather sugar for the anthills

Besides the feckless ills of non-production will ensure your demise 

The grit between my toes is making nice with the fungus in my nail beds

I bet the organisms are partying with the keratin to grow the flaky cells

Back to full strength; the earthen overcoat is surely good for such a purpose

A mole might come and burrow through my thighs; I wonder what diseases I’ll catch? 

Winter is coming; bones sense the lack of lubrication in the joints

The connections go first, like a harbinger of a cholera outbreak on an island

Raise the black flag, land here at your own risk

No vials nor inoculants, merely roots,

Shoots rampant clawing like fingernails for that better bit of soil