Public Option Weeded Out, Baucus Bill Goes On, Medical Insurance Stocks Rise!

"Follow the money."

----Common Saying



The Public Option part of the Health Care Reform bill has
been cut out and Sen. Baucus is excited to bring his initial,
a reach around for Health Insurance Co's, bill to a vote. The fix
is in and Health Insurance Company stocks across the board
were up today. Baucus gets millions from Health Insurance Co's
every year. To make him the "point man" for any type of reform
is like asking a bank robber to investigate a bank robbery.

If Obama does not refuse Baucus' Bill, which is worse than
where we were previous in Health Care, then he is a shill for
Health Insurance Co's. Just like he was a shill for Goldman
Sachs and UBS....And Obama promised to "change the Political
Culture of DC." "Hope" has dropped its mask and become cold
calculation for stuffing party coffers with banking and health
insurance company money. The Change Obama was discussing
wasn't pocket change! But, he still looks better than Dubya.

Obama is shoring up contributors to the DNC for 2010 and 2012.

Voting Booth Quixotes

"Suffrage(Universal): The summit of political science."

----Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas.



To walk into a voting booth in November of any year and think
you are doing your "civic duty" and acting fully "American" is
analogous to Don Quixote thinking, by riding an old roan, hiring
a servant, Sancho, who rides an ass, he is a Knight Errant of the
Chivalric Age doing brave deeds for his Fair Maiden.

The voter's Fair Maiden is "making a difference" and the
heroic deed is the secret vote. The ass groans under the weight
of Chivalric "Civic Duty" and its shopkeeper's idealism. Huge
money interests(lobbies, corporations, etc) behind both of the two
main Political Money Machines are the Windmills the voter must
choose between.

At every polling station a worker is there ready to acclaim
the act with a sticker each voter proudly parades. I "made a
difference"! The voting cattle waddle on with bovinely smiles of
self satisfaction and damn those who refuse to participate in mass
marketed mockeries of universal suffrage-- Where moneyed
interests win every time. The Voting Both Quixotes parade like
brave paladins when the front man or woman for their Money
Machine gets the nod. Here we think of the proud Sancho Panza
being named the Admiral of a landlocked Duchy in Spain.

Isn't She Lovely?

The beauty and grace of my friend, Bidet.

Beau Lit

"We labor to escape loneliness." ---- Bipedal Isotopes, D. A.  

All begins with D. Fat, deviant, 

belly spilling over the void. 

Before seed and fire, 

it touches earth. 

Out of breath,  

stars at fingertips, 

thought strives to keep pace 

with the restlessness of space. 

Sheets cover us with 

measures of inky night 

on a bed of white. 

The wake of the spoken 

leaves me lonesome. 

We run from silence's seduction. 

It all ends with D. Fat, deviant, 

belly fulfilling the end.

The Rhetoric of Reaction and Racism

"They are so natural follies, but so shown,
As even the doers may see, and yet not own."

------Volpone, Prologue, Ben Jonson.



I. The Good Old Days and the Founders

Tea party goers, lobbyists and right wing radio and
TV personalities sing the same song! We are losing
our great nation. Socialism is nigh! We need to go back
to the "good old days". One says we go back to 9-12 when
irrational fears, an understandable reaction, after 9-11
brought us together. Yes, indeed, as one flock fleeced into
sheepishly allowing a complete erosion of Civil Liberties
and also sheep-like acquiescense to a War based on
shocking and awe inspiring lies. Others lament the days
when America was a Virginal Free Market with no fetters!
Yes, let us go back to the USA before Anti-Trust Laws. And
why not go back to those jolly old days when African Americans
were considered 3/5ths of a person and had no real suffrage. Good
old days indeed. Or less further back when they were just denied
equal access to education, suffrage and income. Those were
grand old days!

Kin to this is the Hagiography of the "Founders". Mostly
slaveholders who had just enough irony to write "all men are
created equal" and yet in the same document, with a straight
face, allow for slavery.

There is an undercurrent of Racism in all this Nostalgia.
Obama is the "foreigner". He's not "one of ours". The Birther
movement and the obscene treatment of an elected President as
an enemy of the people by a certain, and very vocal, segment of
society exposes the sad truth: a xenophobic reaction to President
Obama in their Collective Neuroses with absurd and contradictory
fears ranging from, "He's a Marxist, Fascist(Hitler) and a Muslim
secretly sympathizing with his Terrorist brethren".

If only he was more like one of their heroes. Like Reagan, who
sold arms to Iran, a state which funds Hezbollah, for some hostages.
The Reagan who praised Osama Bin Laden as a "Freedom Fighter"
and gave him stinger missiles. And the Reagan who made the US
unilaterally veto an otherwise unanimous vote of the UN to condemn
Iraq for using poison gases against Iran in their war. Talk about a
terrorist sympathizer.

What about the Reagan who bailed out S&L's with a larger sum
of public money than President Obama used to bail out the banks and
lending institutions? Well, he was white and "one of ours".

II. Attacking the Criminal Acts of Our Intelligence Agencies or the
Military Is Un-Patriotic and Helps the Enemy

An American murdering someone in a city in the US does
not, in any way, embarass every American, or would make any foreigner
think every American was a murderer. The same principle holds for
crimes committed by people who serve in the Military or the Intelligence
Agencies. These agencies abide by the law and have even more stringent
rules to protect themselves and our interests, as well as other Americans.
They have to operate with a higher professionalism and greater adherence
to rules because of the incredible sensitivity and importance of their work.
The rule of law holds for them. If we do not hold those who protect us responsible
for adhering to laws we basically allow rogue state conditions. Where free
lancers, agents and even military personnel, whose salaries are paid by the
US Taxpayer, feel they can act as they see fit and overrun Law and their own
agency standards in the name of "success". The "successes" born from such
failures to abide by US and International Laws become greater failures.

Not every military servicemen or CIA operative is a criminal. To clear their
good name and honor the service they provide it is imperative we vigorously
prosecute those who tarnish their honor through murder, torture and other
violations of US and International Law. If we allow them impunity what's to stop
a justification for the FBI to torture US Citizens? If they can argue the "success"
of their criminal act. A bankrobber can't brag to the judge, "Hey. I paid my bills
and got a new car with the money I stole."

Besides, ever since the dawn of Torture as a means of gathering truth, many
experts agree, including most in US Intelligence Agencies(DOD, CIA and
the NSA), that torture only gathers a confession of truths you want. In the purges
of Stalin the Soviets only tortured to get information they wanted, not the truth.
Torture has never been an instrument for truth gathering. It has only been used
as a means to break down the accused and to get them to admit what authorities
desire them to admit. For instance, the US Intelligence operatives in Afghanistan
waterboarded Khaled Sheikh Mohammed numerous times. After about 9 episodes
of such torture he admitted there was a connection between Saddam and
Al Qaeda. Not one respectable Intelligence Operative in the world believes or
believed this was true. It was a confession the US Intelligence Agencies wanted to
give the State Department and the Bush White House as more support for the
dwindling and absurd argument for war against Iraq.


Reaction is exacerbated when a leader calls for change.
When the leader happens to be half black using racist tropes to
defeat the desired change can be justified when it is "successful".
All's fair in reaction and torture. They utilize the same "ends justifies
the means" herring to stupify the masses. "Free" market fideists
cannot help bowing to every "success".

Strung Out, Abandoned, in Paris, 2012

I took a lit Novena. A petition
to cool the furnace that was Paris, August, 2012.
---a mistake Les Bonnes never forgave

She smoked my last bag of hash as I visited
friends in Montmartre. She packed her bags
sans a farewell taste of her Lethean sex.

Not a trace. Not even a whisper of fragrance...

I would have liked to finger fuck her once more,
keeping the scent on my fingers. I would not have
washed my hands for days. Accosting strangers
with an antic élan, "Yes! She broke my heart, but her
mons veneris smelled so dulcet! Here!", thrusting my
finger under their noses, "Smell!"

Parisians are led by the nose. Americans by
the belly and eyes.

Disparate integers came into my head as I attempted
to create an Algorithm for the invasive scents of the
Metro at 3 A.M.. Logic failed me and the equation never
came. She is still gone, along with the embodied
musk which twists an imaginary vine round my left
index finger.

Leave the girls and study mathematics.

My prick weeps as I laugh.

A terrible current is running through me and fuses
with the piss-tinted street lights of Paris. Across from
the Place de la Bastille a beggar shouts at me in Serbian.

How did I know?

One solution: My prick is a sail tacking this
fragile bark towards Champs Elysées. Paralleled trees
line the street and walkways, neat as a discovered equation.
The floral tides tickling my nose tell me Tuileries
are near.

Paris has no mercy. I took a train south and watched
her disintegrate, Seurat style, into pointlessness.

An Apology Is Only the Recognition of a Love for Doom

Anna, my cousin my spouse, I tell the world from every housetop: 

I am sorry for my cozenage. It was small of me and yet smaller 

still the failure to sufficiently sing the sting of your absence. 

A soaked wet blanket sky smothers my eyes. And I, like a grey day 

which greedily holds every raindrop, cannot weep. I ask for the grace 

your beauty sings. Forgive and ford the gulf separating you from me. 

Friendship brings laughter but is no laughing matter. The trust and time

invested makes us all miserly of kindness. End the exile and come home 

to these eyes. Speak so I may see you again. My Doom in every sense, a 

domain of light and articulated beauty, I beg to return. I cast these pearls 

on the run. Hoping they borrow fire from the Sun and find favor in your 

eyes, ebon(not blue). 

Children's Crusade

The Virgin called on
Einhard in the vale,
Her voice rapt
His shaking limbs

A sack and a staff
He carried through town.
In his pledged heart
Her hand moves.

Paupers with hair blonde
As cloudless noon,
Boys high as reeds
With thistle tops

(Thistles they playfully lopped
With imaginary swords
On bright spring days.)
Shared his taking of the Cross.

"To Jerusalem!" he cried.
Starvation took its breath,
Rivers their limbs,
And God gathered His jewels

Scattering them cross heaven
To make the black sky run
A silver streaming light blue
Our Virgin's crystal tears.

Flowing

An engine rumbles softly as tires kick up mist from the
rainwashed asphalt. Pop lullabies tickle my ear. Artificial
Paradises accompanied by flashers and billboards. They tell
us everything goes towards something greater than all the
Stars. Mobility intoxicates me into believing the stillness I
overtake has flown away. The heart swells. My eyes digest.
The double movement of a world that refuses to rest.
Mists quench the cool wind rustling dust from the
porches of my ears. Blowing a sweet "once was" as
the bass of an engine carries it past.

Luz y Sueño

Watch me walk,
a Spanish Grandee,
with teeth white as
impossibility.

Hearts curl in heat
like a foetus,
to fulfill the Sun 
beating us.

We stride
noble and proud, 
with ebon sheen,
Arabian.

Don't cry, yet stay.
Stare longingly 
into the womb 
wasting you.

Flushing the Douche(ca. 1999)

"To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which,
according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier,
is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to
parade its liberation from any scruple when social occasion
arises. Such laughter is a parody of humanism."

-------Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.




Let us imagine a bored man. A man addicted to the self serving chuckle
of a neutrality which disparages all others to exalt oneself. In this fence
sitting Inertopia he reigns. The belly laugh of cravenness is the flourish
announcing his presence. In an Age of Hyper-Consumption, where adjuration
is preached as the holiest of holies, such a man appears wise. Even those who
rankle at his ludicrousness cannot disavow the essence of his up-chuckled
cosmogony.

We can almost see him posturing as he says: "My destiny has been cast
among cocksure women.". A nervous laugh bursts up like the rising sun
after the shame dawns upon him. He calls this effacing. Just as the child
makes its egotism a life and death issue. Yes, folks, the Coup de Fou occurs
afterwards. It was all in jest. He trembles at the threshold of being meaningful.
So, with a straight face, he turns this crippling inability into something
beyond meaning. And then crowns himself with a diadem fashioned from fool's
gold.

Those who fail to accept this Chucklocracy lack, ipso facto, a sense of
humor. Many of us have Uncles who never forgive the brazen inhumanity of
those who do not laugh at their jokes. In this person such a grudge is distilled
into an Ontological Reproach. A sub specie aeterni call for the entire Cosmos
to lighten up and chuckle along! It's the best way to live! Yes! Being a fellow
chuckler suddenly becomes the summum bonum! The dull wit of a timorous,
bored, Paterfamilias becomes the pinnacle of human wisdom. And that, indeed,
is laughable.

Ode to E. B.

Dark eyes draw
to a salubrious night
of hair
tumbling down
soft slopes
of shoulders'
day.

Shoulders and face
enchant like white sails,
a speculator's
ideal space.

Delphic tickers 

Captains shadow

to set sail
or stay.

Pixie mouthed Priestess,
you smirk oracles.

Dollars sacrificed,
an offering to
Saturnine Gentlemen.

Ed Ecco

Kind currents of electricity 

rise from damp tiles in sighing mists.

Ground baptised
by mysterious torrents...
Mother's labor
breaks alterity.

Here every act

recreates order:
Labor's eschatophilia.

Everything anew

as the miraculous
moves to renew.

Terre Haute(Federal Prison Execution Chamber)

I

Out of silence, out of a point, warmth flows.
Acheron bends within me.
Warmth shrouds my limbs 

in cold, antiseptic, light.

Sun's warmth wanes.

I was a boy once. I laughed too.
Now laughter burns
like eyes fighting sleep.

I was a boy.....I laugh,

I cry.

II

The high ground was blessed
with one hundred eyes,
not a cloud in these sombre skies.

It still stinks, drawing its share
of carrion.

The imp tacitly passes.
Cold eyes and colder hearts
scorn the remains.

How a Coachman Died of Corns in 1830's Imperial Russia

--Count T------ had upbraided Lupin more times than the
Tsaritsa had taken ill when the word "December" was
mentioned to never discuss his corns in the Presence of
a District Councillor. Talk like that was enough to keep
him from the rounds at St. Petersburg for three years!
"Did you hear Count So and So's coachman had corns?",
as laughter rose like a tidal wave over him. These reflections
harried him like flies. For each wince he promised a good knock
for the dogged Lupin. "And just look at the way he shuffled",
thought the Count, "any man could see the poor fellow had them!"
--No,  Nizhny Novgorod wasn't far enough banishment for Lupin's 
mighty corns. They haunted the Count's every waking moment. 
Even in dream he'd pass through the Imperial Halls only to be 
taken to task by His Excellency for the shameful condition of his 
Coachman's feet. In the background the Tsaritsa would feel faint. 
He always ended up in the Caucuses the butt of some Clerk's lampoons 
on "The Famous Count Vaporcornikov". It was insufferable. 
His coachman was undermining him au pied. "What is to be done?" 
he mused as he took another pinch of snuff. He must kill Lupin.
--Count T----- thought up every charge he ever laughed about
in the company of peers at The English Club, where Prince G----
held court, for doing a Coachman or peasant in. The Coachman being
foremost to experience the artistic exuberance of these councils.
The Coachman in Russia was akin to the Concierge in Paris: He knew
everything and remained scrupulously circumspect. Such a delicate
balance was bound to falter at times. Sadly, Russians cannot help such
falterings. Each falter registered seismic consequences spreading from
the provinces to the halls of His Imperial Excellency in St. Petersburg.
--Three years on Lupin died in V---- running the gauntlet of "Two Pipes". 
The happy phrase "Two Pipes" meant poor Lupin was to be
thrashed until the District Governor finished smoking two pipes. And,
of course, he appreciated his tobacco slowly, in the  grande style. 
Count T----- swelled with laughter watching Lupin hobble from
one series of thrashings to the next. It was almost enough to make 
him forget three years of Balls missed in St. Petersburg. Almost.

We Always Walk In Circles

We always walk in circles.

An illusion of return,
of homecoming or homesickness
wells up a broken circle
to cover the
cunning of annihilation
disguised by circulation
of blood and respiration.

We always walk in circles.

Imagine absent Suns
and wish ourselves
satellites,
beings practicing
cosmic liturgy.

Love is the radiant
dream of radii
to mend broken
circles within.

Caritas

To Tammay

Dab the spittle
and drag them from the rain

is it rain or the shower
waking me from
past squalor?

her odor elided by fragrance
cool and acrid

Dab the eyes
and drag them from the stain

Of dream,
Childhood, runny noses
and passing beggars
tarrying in the rain

their shivers float a cadence
cruel and tepid.

Bonjour de la Rose

Rosie's taken 
that pill again.

Painting the kitchen
with a finger-nail
polish brush,

Arabesques of cherubs
every three inches.

As her son
hacks with pneumonia,
She hums
an unwritten fugue.

There is a place,
One day,
Where cherubs
fly away as,
at sixteen,
that boy
opens his veins

and dies like
a promise.


A day when
Rosie tells a new love,
"You're just
like my son."

as Cherubs
weep down
dirty walls.

INRI the Navigator

daybreak, judea washed in peach,
light binds pilgrims' white cloth

day leavens as flat bread 
cracks over pitch and smoke

on an ass Elias comes,
the caps laugh 
and ladies sigh

each hoof beat 
shifts its axis

peach ripens to
burnt red as 
day fades

passover the proconsul's uneven sleep,
truth unsettles dream

the carpenter shifts a plank
and nails it to the mast,
our breath soars and is contained

His head lifts us 
past gates
where pilgrims gather.

Chorus Mysticus(21st Century)

All in transmission
Is but reception;
The unattainable
Here becomes elation.
Human fulfillment
Here is passed by,
Endless adolescence
Draw us on high.