Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

The Desert of Low Tide

nothing left to worship     altar broke its leg
became an ordinary chair no ordinary baby
could sit on without falling
                              o siege perilous!
the baby wasn't born
                     was never God to her
    was never a baby
                      was cells   was gone
                        she walked across the sand

to which he gave his knees & jeans
and called the sunset desolate
                               except the sun was rising

                            he demand
-ed praise
             for letting her decide

                                       he couldn't turn his head
or see beyond his heather gray hood

---

written in response to read write prompt 111: broken chair

grape vine walls w/bricked out breaks
hide behind red door
where art isn’t supposed to figure

more than a shape, a number, a dollar

my body feeds these grapes
& sucks them into wine

no savior here

but flashes
—body miming mind

 

 

---

As part of Blogathon 2009, I have posted a poem every half hour for twenty four hours. Please sign up to sponsor me or donate directly to Friends International. Everyone who sponsors me will receive a copy of the revised poems as a chapbook if they email their snail mail address to ekswitaj[at]gmail[dot]com.

 

 

And now, I’m off to sleep.

wheat & corn contend
below the wired pumpkins
they ought to be between

they ought to leave
tech jobs for us humans
and stick to growing yellow,
keep decorative or sweet—
taste makes up for missing teeth

---

As part of Blogathon 2009, I’m posting a poem every half hour for twenty four hours to raise funds for Friends International, an organization that helps street children in Southeast Asia and beyond. Please sign up to sponsor me or donate directly. Everyone who sponsors me will receive a copy of the revised poems as a chapbook if they email their snail mail address to ekswitaj[at]gmail[dot]com. Cheers!

Of course, we should all be outraged that AIG plans to use taxpayer money to pay bonuses, but not one of us should be surprised, nor should we take at face value expressions of outrage from politicians who have done little or nothing to prevent such actions. The fact of the matter is that while this use of $165 million of our money is a highly visible outrage, it is actually in line with the goals of the bailout.

Bailouts for companies like AIG have always been intended to maintain the wealth of those in the higher classes and the instruments by which they expand their wealth in good economic times. A cheaper option would have been to allow these too-big-to-fail companies to fail and then use the money saved by not supporting them to help the little people—people like you and me—affected by that failure. TARP has been a sort of top-down class warfare that seeks to maintain an unsustainable system which has always included cycles of economic misery.

For all the populist positioning and expressions of outrage about these bonuses, it is difficult to believe then that any politicians truly object to these bonuses. Consider the excuses being offered by Obama’s advisers:

 

Mr. Summers suggested that the government’s ability to require the bonuses be scaled back was restricted by preexisting contracts, even though he did not specify what those restrictions may be.

“We are a country of law,” said Mr. Summers, one of several economic officials to hit the Sunday-morning talk show circuit. “There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts. Every legal step possible to limit those bonuses is being taken by Secretary Geithner and by the Federal Reserve system.”

Mr. Goolsbee explained it this way: “I think the root of the problem has been some of the people have things written in their contract that say, ‘Look, you sell this much life insurance, you get a bonus of X,’ and it’s in their contract and that part can’t be changed.”  (source: NYTimes)

 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Please, spare us from the melodramatic populism (mydd.com)
• Bailed-out AIG doles out $165 million in bonuses. (thinkprogress.org)
• AIG still paying bonuses. Oh wells. (dailykos.com)
• AIG is doing it again (americablog.com)
• Rating Agencies Sign Off On Revised AIG Bailout (huffingtonpost.com)
• Why not let AIG fail? Can ’systemic risk’ be a scare tactic? (dailyfinance.com)
• Taxpayers hit by expanding black hole of AIG (telegraph.co.uk)
• Huge amounts of AIG bailout went to Goldman Sachs (dailyfinance.com)
• Stop Feeding Me A Shit Sandwich (eschatonblog.com)
• Report: AIG to get billions more (msnbc.msn.com)
• AIG Said to Be Getting $30B More from Feds (abcnews.go.com)
• Liz Warren: If AIG, Giant Banks Are Too Big to Fail, Why Aren’t We Breaking Them Up? (oxdown.firedoglake.com)

Keith Bridger’s ESSENCE, published in the current issue of ditch, divides neatly into two parts: the first two stanzas describe an effort to distill “SOME PHENOMENON” down to its core (a process of reduction), while the last two reach out towards infinity, first with the search for

. . . THE ONE
WORD THAT IS MADE UP
OF EVERY LETTER

which is actually longer than that, since it can be spelled with the infinitely turning shape of a circle. At first read, I had difficulty with the second half containing more specifics than the first. Shouldn’t a process of decoction be a process of specifics?

In fact, specificity itself is the elixir at the end of distillation. “THE ELEMENT”, whatever is specific about  “SOME PHENOMENON” must be found in order for details to be mentioned. That this is also a prerequisite for the search for infinity suggests microcosm/macrocosm, the world in a grain of sand, and an alchemical understanding.

What, then to say about the poem’s use of ALL CAPS. Of course, given the dominance of all lower-case and mixed-caps in poetry, it works to make those of us who pay attentions to the technical aspects of poetry wonder why Bridger chose ALL CAPS. It also suggests to me the story (legitimate or not) about ALL CAPS being chosen over lowercase for certain now outdated technologies because otherwise one would be forced to write god in a disrespectful way. This certainly fits with the alchemical interpretation of this poem. That said, the difficulty of reading all capital letters and their indication of shouting seem to overwhelm these benefits. Perhaps the use of a smallcaps font isntead would soften these impressions without eliminating the benefits.