Poem I Wrote Five or Six Years Ago

Vanished Girl

The westering sun decomposes on the asphalt of Grover Street,
pools in windshields and the glass fronts of stores,
searching for somewhere permeable to fall

Old woman - prisoner in the throes of growth on the prairie's edge -
steps from the faux brick mouth of the Four Seasons Apartments:
Four seasons, maybe; but all four four of them Autumn:
all descending steadily towards winter

In and out of the postage stamp sunset she moves,
turning towards the bus stop, carrying the gaunt
austerity of her shoulders and the fallow poverty
of her hips, ilea jutting akimbo like the skeletons of horses
bleaching in the desert sun

Startling blue veins twist across her forearms and hands
like back highways in an atlas,
her papery skin in the last stages of a backward alchemy:
transmutation of living gold to a pale leaden grey

Her colorless gaze drifts above the town homes down
Fiftieth Street; she avoids in her exile
all communion with shoppers, mothers and
the cruising proletariat

In the utter loneliness of bustling Middle
America she waits alone, and accepts without
question the injustice of invisibility

------------------------------------------
In the sere lines of her face are mapped years
of such silent stoicism - centuries since youth
and usefulness were exhausted
-------------------------------------------

She recalls, though, in the grass-green days of spring,
the hot breath and rough hands of man;
damp Julys before the bowl of her hips fell barren,
was once filled to bursting with sunrisesexlilac
and foggy river valley funk

Farmers' and ranchers' sons drowned in the flood of her:
in the pendulous weight of her breasts, heavy
with the life of this place: in her warm belly and
eager hips, milk and honey rhythms and August evening
cherry pits
and the nameless eyes falter for a second,
overtaken by memory and loss
so long - an ocean since that touch of heat –

What man would now reach his hand to the vanished girl,
her hunching shoulders and wasted hips,
withering skin and arid lips slowly
folding in upon each other

Too long - too far for a forgotten woman in the
invisible twilight, where the sibilant wind cannot be heard
through the switchgrass and little bluestem,and
the tides no longer roll up the wide Missouri

So, in the failing light, her eyes resume their practiced vacancy
and she waits alone, in the chill of early evening,
staving off memories of warmth

(Copyright 2002, Thomas J Burbach)

Much Peace,
tjb

White People Should Not Attempt to Play Jazz

Am I racist? A little bit against white folks, I think. I really like this coffee shop. The baristas are pretty and sweet, and the drinks are well above average. But Holy Mary's sweet untouched tits, I am going to go insane from all the lily white self-styled jazz musicians tap dancing around the downbeat with all the soul of a corpse bled dry and washed up and washed out on the banks of the Elkhorn after a spring flood. I mean, it's as bad as Stevie Ray Vaughn playing variations of the riff from Red House over and over and styling himself a blues artist. What is it with white people trying to find soul in places in which it just isn't accessible for them? It's the same stink as Frank Sinatra (the Chairman of the Whitey) and Tony Bennett singing the same old shit that cost them nothing, NOTHING, to trot out. For chrissake, does anyone really think Jack Benny and his ilk could even play fluffer to Charlie Parker?

Don't get me wrong, white people have soul. Walt Whitman, Thomas McGrath, The Who, Michelle Shocked, Steve Earle, U2, me, the list goes on.... White people should just not play jazz or blues, unless, of course, they're sitting in with black folks.

Anyway, I have to endure another month+ of inane Christmas music pretending to be jazz. I will try very hard to avoid proselytizing to my fellow white people in this small-city cattleyard, but I may well end up on a street corner in full beard spreading the word of God, otherwise known as John Coltrane.

Much Peace, and a Love Supreme
tjb

"Nothing's the same, the whole city estranged, and restless since you've been gone." (Thomas J Burbach)

Kids are out of town with their mom and I am purposeless, on my third cup of joe and staring at the world in squigglevision.

Forty-eight degrees: warm enough that my surgically-repaired and recreationally re-destroyed knee does not ache. This shoulder, though, is one more avatar of encroaching age, along with the hints of grey in my beard and the slow retreat of my voice from its upper ranges. Knee, shoulder and vox: all three need surgery, for ligaments, labrum and nodes, respectively. Who the hell has time for crutches, slings and silence, though? I can't imagine hobbling after my soldiers for 12 weeks, then only using one hand and no scary voice to keep them out of the street.

Enough self-indulgent bitching. I am still young and charming enough for any 10, well, six people. Here's the deal with Obama (I voted for him, by the way):

1) He has to do what he said he would do during the campaign and his acceptance speech: Audit Government. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Keep the social safety net and cut ridiculous expenditures like a pedestrian bridge across the Missouri and dueling atomic clocks in the same town square. There are billions to be saved. Obama has to draw a clear distinction between being being liberal/progressive (which I am) and being an enabler for pork barrel slush funds. He won't make any friends cutting billions in pet projects, but there's no other way to fund the things that need funding.

2) Absolutely veto the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Look, right-wing talk radio is ridiculous, dishonest, anti-intellectual crap. It flees from facts like kids from a turd in the pool. Studies have shown that folks who get their news from talk radio (or Faux News) are just horribly misinformed. I listen to Hannity, Beck and O'Reilly to find out what's NOT going on in the world (then I go read the Christian Science Monitor for real news). There's a reason George Will isn't guesting on Limbaugh (George Will is very smart). If you take talk radio seriously, I probably think you're a troll whose parents should have considered birth control; but you CAN'T legislate it away. First Amendment. Period. Progressive radio failed because folks that tune in to radio didn't want to listen. You wan't people to listen, craft a more radio-friendly presentation. Passing something like the Fairness Doctrine is an effective admission that we can't spread our message on its own merits, which is clearly not the case given the last election. Let the truth-defiers have their antebellum circle jerk and let's get on with the honest business of revitalizing America.

There will be more to come. As I am something of a midwestern circle jerker (when it comes to football, anyway), I gots to git along and watch the game.

Much Peace,
tjb

The boys and I were up well before dawn this morning to take their mom to the airport. We drove back in the early cold, stopping to get coffee, and I directed their attention to the methodical advance of light in the east. I saw the color and shadow over the abandoned grain elevators, their bases overgrown with rough weeds and rougher trash, and I was reminded of thousands of mornings in hundreds of places...

-over the battered, scarred bluffs in Gering, NE

-avatars of sun from over my shoulder, past the guides on my fishing pole to touch the surface of the poor, abused Caloosahatchee River

-through weariness and terrible sorrow, cajoling my failing car to find my Friend in Ames, IA

-from Omaha to the Northern Territories; unbroken prairie, wind and song

-bourgeois sun over bourgeois snow and a decidely un-bourgeois blown knee in Silverthorn, CO

-febrile with caffeine and exhaustion rolling into a party in Austin, TX

-light cold, pale and intense, and me mostly dead from altitude sickness at 17, 000 feet in the Andes

-innumerable bicycle rides through empty Omaha streets, shirt and tie in my backpack, wondering at my good fortune

-everyone but the horses asleep on Mike and Mary's farm inAberdeen, SD; I sneak to the lake in the early dark to catch a fat catfish not two feet from shore

-making insane love for hours with Jennifer on the big red couch...six years of want sated...She left at sunrise, the last time I saw her alive.

-down, down, forever down, via an old ramshackle bus with one headlight out, down at unsafe speeds on narrow mountain roads, my Friend wisely asleep from a Valium...racing the sunrise from Huaraz to the coastal city of Chiclayo.

-cowboy coffee, bracingly bitter, brewed in a saucepan over a butterfly camp stove in the Boundary Waters. Oyster Lake shines like a pure shard of the sun.

-eyes itchy and frustrated...driving back and forth between Squaw Lake and Deer River in the Chippewa National Forest, trying to find the goddamn turn to reach Campbell's Empty Bar

-my big brother Max and I leave the less-dedicated anglers wrapped in their blankets, and we throw buzzbaits and Hula Poppers into the weedbeds of Sand Lake

-Pembina, ND, and dawn falls like honeyed poison through the trees in the churchyard; even the sun fears the violence remembered here

-16, torn with love and sociopathy, pacing all night; morning finds me awake on my knees and hopeless in the absence of prayer

-stoned: really, really stoned and seven solid hours of video game football. Keyshawn Johnson had over 10,000 receiving yards

-a little light seeps through a gap in the blinds; Max and Will are only a few weeks old, tiny, curling aginst each other asleep on my chest

-men and boys from 10-50, playing soccer at the crack of dawn on a basketball court in Lima...an enormous staircase from Alejandro's flat to the beach below


...and sunset on that same stretch of Peruvian sand: my Friend and I standing together, but quite apart, looking out at the endless Pacific. The boys still sleep in the back seat in Omaha, but I am taken. I remember in my body that which I have never known, have always remembered. The ocean: ages of restless harmony and dissonance falling into me, briny and cold. Somwhere past brother and Friend, beyond lovers and sons...in the rhythmic depths is my undiscovered home...rest from this unbearable restlessness.

Ouch

"... The very financial companies that tried to prevent individual Americans from having some kind of an opportunity to bail themselves out from their individual financial troubles are now rushing to the government to assist them in their financial troubles. " (Amy Goodman, 2008)

Remember a few years ago when the big fat bottoms in Congress bent us all over for the financial industry and made it more difficult for Joe Schmo to file bankruptcy? Those same pimp politicians are again helping screw you in the ass by rewarding that same industry's criminally irresponsible behavior with $700 billion of your money. We're just a pimper's paradise, to quote Bob Marley, more than happy to give our hard-earned cash to banks and finance companies who charge us interest for our patronage, or to put it in 401(k)s that assure us of nothing but richer CEOs moving farther away from we unwashed masses. We meekly submit to the entire credit bureau gulag, where someone checking your credit immediately hurts your credit, but removing a credit bureau mistake or an instance of fraud is virtually impossible.

And for what? So we can buy shit RIGHT NOW! IMMEDIATELY! that we cannot immediately afford without giving economic handjobs to Visa and American Express. That's really it, peeps. We enable the most predatory individuals and entities in the world so we can buy things for which we don't have the ready cash.

So don't be fooled. This "bailout" is not necessary to preserve the health of our nation. Quite the contrary, it is a desparate (but predictable) attempt to perpetuate the current fundamentally diseased credit-based economic paradigm, with the added purpose and result of redistributing income from you and me to the already obscenely wealthy.

"...the poor stay poor and the rich get rich/that's how it goes..."

Is anyone at all surprised that we are bailing out the richest and whitest guys at the heads of some of the most irresponsible corporations, while poor and multicolored folks (some certainly with eyes bigger than their pocketbooks) face foreclosure? If you are surprised, you shouldn't be. Most of the economic infrastructure in this country is in place to funnel wealth to those already possessed of great wealth. Most of our "law enforcement" is in place to protect the haves from the have-nots and the want-to-haves. These structures are working quite well in the manner in which they are intended to work.

"Roughly 60 percent of the economic gains in our country went to just to the top .05% of taxpayers. When comparing gains overall throughout the taxpayer base, the so-called middle class had economic gains of just 10% from 1979 to 1997 while America’s wealthiest rose 157% (after taxes). When factoring in the cost of inflation, a 10% gain over almost 20 years actually translates into a loss." (Paul Krugman, NYT, 2002)

Contrary to Saint Ronald the Second Coming of Holy Jesus H. Christ Reagan and his Kool-Aid-drinking Branch Davidian Scientologist-I'll-hook-you-and-Katie-Holmes-up-to-a-fake-machine-followers, that shit does not trickle down; nor is it intended to do so. When Reagan and his circle-jerk Democratic congresses passed legislation deregulating S&Ls, Reagan said "I think we hit the jackpot." Ask John Keating McCain about who cashed in. It sure as hell wasn't the majority of Americans. The same ethic, or lack thereof, holds true with the recent bailouts. Royalty gets their asses saved, the offending CEOs retire with tens of millions, and poor folks get the shaft. To talk about those numbers, of course, is to engage in class warfare or "the politics of envy." Facts are anathema to the Plutocracy. They want us to get all pissed off about queers and abortion while they wage true and effective economic warfare against the rest of us.

So what do we do? It will take a major shift of perspective. The problem is, most of us decry the imbalance now, but would quickly shut up about it and enjoy being part of the Plutocracy if we just had the coin. So we work our fingers to the bone, neglect our kids, and "invest" (which means giving your money to those same rich irresponsible CEOs to play with and lose), all in the hope that we might acquire some of the same expensive, shiny and unnecessary crap that Bob Nardelli acquired through the literal blood and sweat of his employees.

I don't claim purity; I do compromise and buy my boys the slightly more expensive cereal with dried fruit in it, and I do occasionally replace my guitar strings. but I can honestly aver that I have no interest in a BMW or a chic condo. I am perfectly happy with a roof, food, and my used Ford Focus. Hell, if I hadn't totaled it, I would still proudly be driving my 1999 Chevy Prizm. Should I ever get married (admittedly an unlikely proposition), it will not be with an overpriced and blood-soaked little rock.

I don't really want to preach, but the only way to effectively counterract the wholesale redistribution of money from you to guys like Ken Lay, John McCain and Barack Obama is to spend less of it. The Plutocracy wants, in fact desperately NEEDS, you to be in debt, because they own the debt and, by extension, you. The same CEO shipping jobs from Nebraska to China laughs all the way to his summer home when some Nebraska kid goes into hock for a huge truck he can't afford. So spend less. Keep your money and quiet that laughing asshole down. Don't buy a bigger house than you can afford and pay off Ass-boy's yacht with your interest payments.

Much peace

"I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night alive as you and I..."

I am weary of talking about unions, but I can't let regurgitated Hannity propoganda go unanswered.

Much like the consistently intellecually dishonest right-wingers who claim that real wages have gone up, but casually skate over the fact that they're not speaking in constant dollars, Maury plucks out select pieces of my argument for the necessity of organized labor and dissembles. Acting on the pretense that his argument is honest and not just more sophomoric Karl Rove spin, I will grace it with serious answers.

Q) "Are you trying to tell me if an employee at Wal-Mart, which abhors unions, were to lose their arm in an accident, they would have no recourse?"

A) No, I am not. I have no doubt that a worker permanently crippled at a WalMart would be compensated (I am less certain he or she would be set for life.) ... right now. Because of the threat of work stoppages, i.e.: because of the rise of organized labor, the government stopped supporting and joining in the abuse of workers and passed laws to meet some of the workers' demands. Every one of those laws was fought tooth and nail by Management, and by much of government. Let's be clear: the Oligarchy/Plutocracy didn't and doesn't give two shits about the health or safety of its workers. The laws in question were passed not because of any ethical or moral code, but only because organized labor held the power to delay and diminish profits; because workers organized and said enough. Should the threat of work stoppages and the accompanying threat of delayed or diminished profits disappear, we would without question see workers' protections diminished and ultimately go by the wayside. It could take 10 years, or 20 or 50; but without the real threat of an organized workforce halting production, Walmart or Home Depot, and the politicians in their pockets, would happily let an employee bleed out on the back loading dock. Don't kid yourself otherwise. Furthermore, Walmart and other non-union corporations provide benefits solely out of fear that their workforce could unionize. I have sat through the anti-union screeds at some big box retailers, and it's easy to see the cause and effect.


Here's the real deal: Maury and wingnuts like him are offended by the pinko commie idea that workers might get together and try to snag a bigger piece of the pie. Their position is inherently contradictory crap, of course. Management constantly colludes in an attempt to depress wages and benefits. In the wingers' bizzaro world, it's considered Capitalism for management to use the resources gained on the backs of workers to organize and hire lawyers and create committees to figure out how best to decrease compensation for those workers; but it's considered anti-American Communism for workers to organize in an attempt to increase their compensation. What a load of selective, anti-competitive crap. Management can organize and try to get the most out of isolated employees, but workers can't organize to try to get the best deal that they can. Hmm...Suppressing competition: sounds pretty anti-Capitalist to me, but there you go. The nuts don't really want a free market where EVERYONE can pursue their own best interests. They want a market where the bottom 99% pursues the best interests of the upper 1% (The truly disgusting thing is that Maury and Co. want you to believe the two are the same thing). Should unions go away, you'll see Maury's World reinstated as quickly as the police goons killed the preacher in the Grapes of Wrath.

Oh, and John McCain is as much a maverick as I am a saint.

Much Peace