True Treasures Shine Without Spotlights

To exist in this society is to be drained dry by wealthy sociopaths, the ultimate thieves, the only thieves who matter, hence their constant monopoly media diversions to disparagements of everyone but themselves, themselves the slim category of people with the worst morals on earth, enabling them to take the most money from those with little to none, yet this same silenced, still very much alive majority remains rich in values and depths the materially vicious will never reach, here in this society defined by backwards hierarchy, an anti-meritocracy masquerading human trash as treasure, while the true treasures shine on, reflecting and sharing a light outside the television glare that is not accessible to these broken loud creatures, who keep on with their screaming, looting, projecting…

Level by Level

What is a society? What are we doing? Everyone's mad all the time, pumped up on retail crime propaganda, and one required component of that anger is not being in the crosshairs, but redefining victimhood as having to see people in the crosshairs, poor people with no place to live but tents, thanks to quite deliberate wealth hoarding, public fund misallocation, and lying, brought to us again and again by politicians and the monied class that is now characterized by having no class at all, as well as a vanishing amount of empathy, ethics or joy. Knowing that, I also know not to put much of any stock in what these bullhorn hogs are screaming about day in, day out, though the narrative they advance as truth really falls apart when you witness who and what their screaming seeks to drown out.

Yesterday, I passed the encampment under the overpass nearest my home, neither of which is in a bad area, unless you consider a bad area to be anyplace in a metropolis you can see visible poverty or, in the fashion of our current times, even just things you don't care for, a category spanning an enormous range of experiences that are now being weirdly equated, especially by westsiders, as if driving by someone without a home is as traumatic as not having a home.

Yesterday, I didn't avert my eyes as I tend to do, and caught myself starting to do, because the public shaming of people living in tents has taken gaping to a breathless level and I felt like a prying eye even looking at this point. But when I did look, I saw a woman in her 60s in a wheelchair, back to the street, facing a tent, talking to a tall man in his 40s she seemed to know about something she was upset about, hand gesturing, and I saw a man in his 20s sweeping the area in front of his tent on the sidewalk across the street. They read to me as people dwelling in the raw and ongoing aftermath of terrible financial situations, people who ran out of rent money, whose car got dispossessed, people with no place to go, as stats on actual housing placements will show. Eviction, job loss, trouble functioning as a veteran, trouble functioning period explain, more often than not, how people have come to cluster together in these encampments, despite all the attention attracted by, then diverted to, the criminal element that exists there as in any other community, only with far less power than the criminals governing the way this economy is structured, this structure now falling down, level by level.

On the Balcony

I wrote this poem during grad school in 2003, the days of American politicians mass murdering Iraqi civilians and white house poetry readings being cancelled due to the expected presence of anti-war poets, and read it in public at the end of the semester with the rest of my poetry class at USC, Los Angeles, instead:

On The Balcony

If I sent myself hurtling
into the night, would
the stars cease? Would
they even blink? I am
not discernible in the dark.
I run on auxiliary now, a
woman rolled over, shocked and
awed into submission, at
the mercy of an American flag.

But I am not allowed
to poem this protest: regret has been pushed out
onto this crumbling ledge, unable
to find a way back through their
rockets’ red glare.

So I send myself careening
into the stars, a whisper
or a scream,
extinguished.

Breaking

A society where politicians decide who is unwell 

is a society that has folded in on itself, completely. 

Rule by subhumans in suits continues: 

More news pretending this isn't the case at 11...

Social Murder

Distant drums bring the news of a kill tonight:

Sanitation workers have been rendered now by sociopathic politicos into yellow-suited signs signaling forced dispossession, into arbiters of touchless violence against bodies deemed unsuitable to view, let alone exist, signs in suits performing the discarding of things required to be human here, medicine, clothing, ID, combined with disposal of the things’ accompanying bodies