Give me a can of beans,
just any kind you please:
Kidney, Lima, red,
and especially black eye peas.
I eat 'em with eggs for breakfast.
Put 'em on toast for lunch.
Mash 'em with roasted peanuts
at dinner, for the crunch.
They're always on sale at the market;
forty-nine cents per can.
A pantry full of Goya,
and I'm feeling like a new man.
So what if they make me gassy?
So what if the foodies object?
I live by myself on fixed income;
don't need to be so circumspect!
As a foolish and scared
middle aged man
fleeing heavy fees
for a failed marriage
I washed up on the beach
in Ban Phe.
Sure, I was a coward;
most men are
when it comes to money.
Rather than face the music
I faced the brightness of wild
cloud wrack over
the Gulf of Thailand.
Taught a little English.
Ate a lot of shrimp fried rice
on banana leaves.
Knew a Thai woman my age
who drank her beer with ice in it.
She owned a black Toyota truck.
Imagined my kids
come to visit me
on my coconut plantation.
I rented a bungalow
with a yard full of soursop trees
and a fish pond;
the spirit house was next to
the privy.
Toyota truck woman
hung orchids everywhere --
ten baht apiece.
I felt whole on the surface;
underneath were my limestone caverns,
ready to collapse into sink holes
at the drop of a wide brimmed hat --
which you needed in that climate.
When my dreams began to fill with snow
I let my passport lapse
and borrowed money to go back.
Come back to canned mangoes.
Crumpled hundred baht notes
I mailed to my kids --
the letters were returned
'Address Unknown.'
And tall stringy bamboo plants
in the waiting rooms of government
agencies,
waiting for them to take away . . .
well, everything.
But I eventually found out
when they take away everything
from you
you grow new shoots
like the bamboo.
Although you're still
hollow
inside.
********************
Theodore Freedman, of Camden NJ, analyzed the above poem thus:
"That was your best work my old friend. Your best work because I heard how honest and real this time was for you and how you were filled up and empty at the same time. The Buddhists would aver that the empty space in you is the good part, the useful part. A coffee cup is only useful because of the empty space inside."
The truth is out of vogue, it seems.
With factories producing streams
of falsehoods for a tidy sum,
and workers stir the vilest scum
to mold opinions that will cause
humanity to show its claws.
No one knows the final price
of this booming cyber-vice.
Men have eyes for only wealth,
and so they work in techno-stealth
to rain deceit upon the globe
like acid precip's deadly robe.
Yet truth cannot be hid for long;
it sings an everlasting song
that rises over all the smut
of discord and foul scuttlebutt.
And those who deal in wholesale lies
will find they've won a tinsel prize.
Meanwhile guard the light within
and laugh at all the foolish din!
Joseph Mercola, an osteopath,
doesn't know bupkis but he can do math.
Misinformation is his stock in trade;
he's pulling in money with his masquerade.
Facebook and Twitter have posted his trash
and viewers seem willing to give him their cash.
No vaccination! he endlessly posts.
They're unnecessary, he constantly boasts.
Eat plenty of yogurt, and mattresses shun,
and this, he does claim, is how health will be won.
A quack with some letters right after his name
is often believed by the mentally lame;
they lap up his products at prices immense
and show all the world how they lack common sense.
How sad that a market will always exist
for mountebank promises that turn to mist!
If I were a trout in Montana
I would not be shouting hosanna.
The streams are too low
and warming up so
I'd feel like a rotten banana.
The Olympic Stadium shows
Mr. and Mrs. Rows;
an old circus term
that made troupers squirm --
meaning the bank would foreclose.
Corporations like to be
thought full of integrity.
Corp'rate funding is the club
they use all bad things to drub.
In their mighty righteousness
they are careful with largesse.
Yet, when viewed at closer range,
their donations can seem strange.
Sometimes they will help finance
demagogues and their shrill rants.
Legislators who betray
common sense have their payday
from the likes of Comcast Inc. --
keeping pograms in the pink.
Thus the bizness hypocrite
sins while quoting holy writ;
keeping both sides satisfied
with profits always magnified.
Americans are tough as nails,
but we refuse to put on veils.
No matter what the bigwigs say
the nude face is now here to stay.
Delta, schmelta -- no big deal.
It seems as trite as glockenspiel.
The more the politicians whine
the more the people take a shine
to freedom from restraints and masks
and turn to more important tasks --
like picture shows, or baseball games
and cooking wienies over flames.
We'll not be masked again, I trow --
we seek a lethal status quo!
(to the tune 'Home on the Range.)
Oh, give me a home
where the nudists don't roam;
where the underwear stays quite unseen.
Where never is viewed
scanty clothing so lewd
that Hugh Hefner would call it obscene.
Bare, bare in the street --
where I'm seeing bold bosom and seat;
this summer the crowd
thinks full frontal's allowed
and my brain cannot hit the 'delete.'
