poem: It's a Wonderful Community

flower petals in the air
said the visiting Frenchman  Pierre
your boy is getting busy with the clippers
a shorter stemmed rose is only fair
for the upwardly mobile  pair

roses clipped off folks with greenbacks
leads to vigorous hacky sack
big boys looking chipper
like an acrobat
over top of a net made of crack

petals falling into the muck
once a month a pastry truck
full of workers and hedge clippers
pulls out the folks who have been getting stuck
and removes them in the truck

A really good poem comes out like a cobra in a basket

Too Good For Most

a firefighter's dalmation bought the business
massive dog coronary
last words were "Arf I'm surprised world affairs are still in dissaray."
then nothing
goes limp
falls over
a fraternal order formed a configuration with their defribulator
a St. Bernard juggled beads and prepared to give last rites
sports fans tore at their jersies
Rin Tin Tin made a cameo
dead stars came trumpeting in
free trip to Atlantic City
the hefty brunt of loss
seemed to be walking through wet cement
I feel the same way about gentrification
the dog dragged burning biddies out
through the duct work in shanties
rescued orphans
bit wife beaters on the leg
dog heaven
no place else for a beast this fucking good

Big Bruce's Poetry Corner

Animal Report

I know that octopus can invert its satchel
it's shy under observation
but you have to see it caviling and hoarding 

I am hardly invading its condo
the sea food thinks it has rights
it went to school
it is in its will to raise joyous clouds of silt
it should try to engage with the seaweed

spaghetti arms have to succumb to coaxing
it's locked in the twelth century and rejects the enlightenment
that's regressive
no big deal 
yet
this stuff escalates
at this phase  fish mull options

there he goes firing ink
no danger of it soiling the news
my papers are safely rolled
the brass coin-operated telescope is locked
I'm vaccinated
cepholopod in mental static weighs narrow options

it says in the book the thing can flip
it's been holding out 
eight arms refusing to play the zither
the octopus won't sing
we get nervous

The State of the Cheapness Address

So just how, as a society, fucked are we?  There are a few people out there, won't say who, too goddam incriminating these days to express optimism, that think maybe things, like ' the human fucking condition' isn't so fucking bad.  Maybe people still have it good, but they are too jaded and entitled-to-better to realize everything is grand, wonderful, gorgeous and so fucking near perfection they need only jerk off and roll over in bed to love every last second of time on the planet Earth.

 Some people are being complete assholes about that last presidential election.   The formerly orange and now gray haired President just eased off the cash penalty for not buying the ACA.   You might recall, even if you liked the Affordable Care Act, that it was coersive, and penalized people for not buying into it.  It's a despicable and un-American policy.  Imagine for a sec that maybe Trump will produce a better medical establishment then the  one that screwed the public during the Obama presidency, and during the last few shit-hole presidencies, like the Bush Family Reunion At Our Fucking Expense, and the Clinton Fast Shuffle,

But I didn't drop my ass in this disintegrating easy chair in front of my shitty old refurbished Walmart Black Friday Sale computer to say nice things about the Trump administration.  That would be sheer madness.   Only a complete asshole would opine that positive results could, in the long run, be obtained by down-sizing the public sector and better enabling progress in the private sector.  Only a complete piece of shit would let anyone talk out loud about free market economics.  So I will stick to discussion topics I actually know something about:   The Low End.

I know all about the cheapest merchandise available, like the shit you buy at Walmart, Kmart and off the Internet.  The cheapest blue jeans look near enough as good as the most costly blue jeans to suggest the difference between wealth and poverty isn't great enough to bother getting pissed off about.  People living in upscale gated communities are about as cash strapped as peons flipping burgers for minimum wage.  Even if the upper middle class has it better than the poor, a fast round of corporate downsizing, such as has happened at least once a decade for the last fifty years, could drop the bottom out of an entire social class quicker than snot in February.  If we are unequal, we are all equally subject to financial ruin.  And in the mean time, consumer goods have never been cheaper by way of the Free Trade Agreement.   We have been getting stomped, yet we have all the cheap kitch a fool could wallow in.  Cheer the fuck up.  We still have cheap consumer crap, and there is an outside chance the human condition could, in the long run, improve.

Stranger Danger and the Free Anchovies (true fiction)

A lot of people cuss at the sight of anchovies.  Mere mention can bring out the worst in people.   Some people have fear of them, for others it's purely revulsion, without redemption of any sort of thrill.   Imagine the Indy 500 all stopped in a neat row while a yellow school bus discharges passengers.  People get just as angry over food.    I have found it, at times, unwise to tell people I like anchovies.  Reactions can be frightening.  And actions can be recondite.

The man gave me free anchovies.   I like the fish.  A lot.    Seemingly more than most.  Why, my closest associates despise them.   My outside favorite thing in life is cold left over pizza, with chovies, first thing in the morning.   This was for fresh pizza in the afternoon.  So there was the human element in it.

The choice was with or without pepperoni, simple, simple, simple.  I was feeling just the wee-est capricious one second, ordering, like normal, at Pizza Frank's.  As I pondered 'plain or pepperoni,'  I asked, on impulse, or hypnotic suggestion, "is it possible to get a slice with anchovies."

The paunched muscular skin head behind the counter, in a sagging yellow wife beater shirt,  snapped to.  This was an unusual show of civic responsibility on this man's part.  He decided on the spot to substitute chovies for pepperoni.  I am not a spring chicken.   Pizza hole managers are not obliged to do this.   He could have said, "No. Chovies are for special order on the main menu.  Assholes ordering single slices don't get fucking anchovies, you stupid little  prick."

But the brutish looking skin head with Aryan Nations neck runes smiled and proudly did a special order, just to be nice.  I really wasn't expecting the kindness and bonhomie.  That was a very moving little executive decision on that pizza dump manager's part. I ain't what you call a 'big spender.'
That one afternoon anchovies swam into the greater human consciousness.  Nasty looking people do nice things.   I get that message often.   The McDonald's establishment on Wood Street seems to be predicated on this conundrum.  The truth is muddled in pickles and secret sauce.

So what do you know, I'm watching the evening local news, first a report from the 'desk' that a man was caught poisoning the feral cats that some kind soul had been feeding and grooming.  Then it goes to 'on site' reporting, first, the not terribly attractive woman who loved feral cats talked to reporters.  She saw the man do it.  She saw him feeding something to the cats.  On paper plates.  The very same disposable amenities nearly all cat lovers use to feed strays and ferals.  She didn't have to go into much detail.  Everyone who saw the broadcast could infer that this was, in feral cat parlance, the lowest.  So the story goes, he laced cat food with moth balls, which is a rough way to go.

And there he was, being led away, hands cuffed behind his back, cops of both genders leading him away, he in his yellow sagging wife beater shirt.   He spoke to the reporters, with a hateful,defiant grin.  The last thing he said before they went to the next story was, "There's no way those cats had any rights"   First time for everything.  I'd never thought of cats as needing rights, until he said that.
And after that, I didn't see the guy at the pizza shop when I stopped there between bus runs from home to downtown to where ever else I go, eat a slice of pizza, and try to find something to do.  I've been 'at liberty' for a while now.  That cemented in mind that the man who gave me free chovies was also the cat killer.  It was hard to tell, from the news, if it was the same person, but his not being there anymore was proof enough.

A few months later I was in there, having a slice, when he bounded in, looking very pleased to be out and about.  "I'm back," he announced, proudly, though he wasn't working there anymore.  Don't know if he did jail time.   The day he gave me free anchovies I was wondering if he was the sort of person I might want for a friend.  Seemed likable, in most ways.  The shirt was a indication maybe not.  Then I wondered if he was a cat killer before he gave me the chovies, or if one rash act, after the chovies,  had made him one.  I wondered if a loathesome act should be reason to shun a person.   If a person becomes different for having poisoned feral cats?  And whether it's wrong to accept free anchovies from a person capable of it.     Everyone is capable of being  a piece of shit.

Too late. For the feral cats.  For friendship with ordinary people in common places.   Never know what's cutting the pizza.  The concept of friendship appears to have been fed cat food mixed with mothballs.  It's been like this for decades.
.........

Infantilization and the Hissy Fits of Recent History

Recent memory, to a true hearted intellectual fat fuck, should stretch, like Silly Putty, back to at least 1990.   That was when it became popular for grown adults to walk around their techno-marvel work places in Silicon Valley, carrying stuffed animals.   They spoke to one another in a practiced, nurtured hypnotic child-like prattle.   Some of these creeps were writing software with the acumen of classical composers, while acting, outwardly, like it was play time in an exorbitantly plush nursery school.  Their minds were primo, yet they subscribed to a morbidly regressive new age in behavior management.

Somewhere in the bowels of secular humanism there was an intellectual movement that professed a human condition best served by permanent, cradle to grave childhood.   To take the role of an adult is too restrictive, frightening, intimidating and authoritarian to allow individuals to be the loving, endlessly creative bundles of joy people should be, and through distant history, haven't been.  People have been bigoted, jingoistic war mongering sadists and ego maniacs, all propelled by selfishness and greed.  The barbaric, stupid adult majority has been whooping ass on more creative, sensitive child-like  people for centuries, and the wimp ass minority figured out a way to fix the problem.  They learned social science.

The philosophy of permanent childhood was taught to the public through psychotherapy.   Mass media sold it to the public, too, presenting celebrity research head shrinkers like the this years model of the four barrel  Chevy Caprice.    Patients were encouraged to hold a stuffed animal and prattle like a two year old.  Their behavior was molded to eliminate mean ass adult words and phrases, and to replace the old mean, linear, goal oriented  language with a simpering, caviling one that doesn't scare anyone.  Or accomplish anything, because the end result of mass infantilization is that people become helpless pussies, and thus, victims of people who aren't living in an artificially cultivated infantile state.  People have become politically inert.  Infantilation renders people amenable to fairy tales, and thus open to deception.   This is why we have the kind of government we got.  Infantilization makes people foolishly accepting of total bullshit.  Most currently, babies are screaming blue murder over our new Fed Gov while neglecting to fess up it was their failure take the role of responsible adult that allowed politicians to take candy from babies.    We fucking need to grow up.