Old & Gray
Pipsqueaks
Road trip
In the life I didn’t live with you I am not so fucking complicated, and you are slower to anger.
In the life I didn’t live with you, you didn’t collect so many reasons to give up and I didn’t provide as many.
In the life I didn’t live with you we had more sex and accepted our imperfections calmly, without anxiety.
Partly as a result, in the life I didn’t live with you, we have two children.
Yes, a boy and a girl.
And In the life I did not live with you, we are driving with them, through the forest to the sea.
Hugh Miller
by Hugh Miller
At the peak of summer, the people here turn into bears
on the day we realize
that the blackberries are ripe
bicycles lie beside the bushes and cars are parked
next to sunny, vacant lots that usually nobody comes to visit
blackberry: the practical sister of the glamorous rose
a factory weaving its blue-black sweetness in a nest of cruel thorns
as if it hated being thought generous and didn’t want to be bothered
by fingers and beaks and mandibles reaching like jewel thieves for the dark gems
red berries gleam a warning sign “Stop, all I have is bitterness”
and resist greedy hands like proud virgins
but the purple ones, like little jam fingerprints among the thorns,
drunk on their own sugar,
cooked by sunshine,
& yearning to drop their seeds,
sigh with pleasure as
they tumble
into
your mouth.
CRISPPR Gene Therapy packaged in a tasty pop-format.
The political debate in the United States has gradually developed a tacit consensus that if ordinary people try to advance their interests they are being self indulgent and childish. Yet advancing the interests of the wealthy and powerful, “the owners” as George Carlin put it, is sensible, mature and realistic. It isn’t surprising since untold millions have been spent to achieve this version of common sense.
Our government has become the agent of the owners against the people of the United States. We pay absurd prices for health care, internet access, etc., because the free market is suppressed by the owners conspiring against us. If our lives are spent struggling to work enough to stay afloat and to keep paying interest on our debt for school or home or medical care, if out our lives are diminished or even endangered it doesn’t matter a shred to the owners. We exist to pay them. That’s why we are here. We are payment units. It doesn’t matter if we are happy or healthy, we exist to maximize their profit.
The owners demand to be in charge of every area of our lives, to make each a service they own and allocate at minimum quality and cost for maximum profit. They want the roads and highways, they want our schools and postal service, they want the armed services and prisons. They own the non-governmental services of health care and insurance and communications and internet access and so much more. They want us to have nothing of our own, nothing independent of them. Nothing will be corrected by “Market forces”. The government is being used by the owners to suppress market forces for the elite. Continue reading
