HoopDance

Read the fifteen perfect lines opening screenwriter David Benioff’s novel, City of Thieves, and you will be hooked.

Transported into the Nazi siege of Leningrad, with the Russian winter clamped down harder than God’s fist, you become third-party to the abomination of war and fanatic politics, and eavesdrop on conversation between a wildly bawdy Russian con-man/deserter and the skinny teenaged son of a Jewish poet, a pair of the most unlikely heroes in recent fiction. (Read on …)

Bright-faced flowers and bushes circle these old foundations,

the way wagons rolling West once curved in defense of life and limb.

This is the country where seasons still bloom from memory to hope.

Settlers have put down 30-year stakes and nested here on the

well-kempt streets, caped inside green yards played by stair-step

next generations, romping with their furry side-kicks.

Weekdays childish hordes grab lunch boxes decorated with

super heroes, stuffed with PB&J’s,  and run for a bus to that place

where they are all taught to count on the future.

Weekdays Moms and Dads back out of the driveway,

bearing lunch in a brown paper sack. Frugal and reasonable, they

support the PTA, make work happen, help neighbors, and pay on time.

For this crime of naïveté all stand in contempt, and are

accused of harboring the ‘American Dream’. Guilty of

trust and that silly old belief in the law, these little people have

Mortgaged it all to powers housed far from the family place,

in great skyscrapers of marble, steel and glass fed by

concrete streets and elevators that rise higher than ethics.

There nothing but a faceless number in a computer knows

their address, their name. The only thing green is plastic,

% interest is the only crop; and honesty died with the Pilgrims.

Even then some insider with options back-dated, off-shore shells, birthday parties

where the ice statues piss champagne, and bonuses for failure and greed,

is stealing their last identity for quick sale on the internet.

______© Val Morehouse, September 2008

poetry

writing and poetry

If, according to Bob White of the Allentown Morning Call, “[Hell] is full of overpaid, outsourcing, golden-parachuting, employee-abusing, worms…”; then Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, This land is our their land: reports from a divided nation, documents what a “heck-of-a-job” this “market is deity” crowd has done on the country and everyone in it since 9/11.

Her scorn hot as a griddle, Ehrenreich frys the corporatocracy, health care, and academia (AKA Fleece U) in the fat of their own bloat. Her wit is wicked, her research eye-opening, her courage unstoppable, and her conclusions scathing: “the flip side of misery is gluttony”–-starring super rich who can never get enough to “appreciate …what it feels like to have enough.” Think Dickens. Robber Barons. Enron. McCann’s seven (or was it 8?) houses. Disgraced bosses caging $100 mil+ from bankrupt companies. Think $50 for a hospital gown (better damn well be from Talbots). Think the latest local salary abuse story in your local newspaper. (Read on …)