Same Old

I am already reverting back to my 2002 level of poverty, the stress of such that led Poets & Writers to kick me off Speakeasy. My remaining savings is but the smallest cushion, clock ticking, whether or not I can freelance back in to sustain my online activity, and I doubt it. Liberty rescued me the first time, around the early nineties, when the Internet became a word that has since backdated in currency, but the updraft from the disability center was enfeebled at best, looking back all that way. My work under Linda 1 and Linda 2 was not stressful, and indeed, in context, it was ridiculous, and it was before my assault. It is very difficult for me to convey to my twitter account, even to other Philadelphia accounts, how much urban poverty, urban violence, had damaged me between 1993 and 2009, the latter date a kind of murky cut off for a cap on the African American retreat on what had been a continuing escalation to evict me. To go where, to do what, I cannot tell you, but some months before his birthday, I told mio padre, "You and mommy were right. I should have left Diamond Park and come home." Within days. Google Maps has a picture of these twin units, nothing more than an ugly and urban brutalist architecture, from which I could only go to another building with the pretentious hypocrisy of the same sort, and no, I am not grateful. Do slumdogs, whether Indian or Thai, have it worse? I cannot really rate it, because my youth was a boomerang between hospital and institution and back again. So no wonder then that poor Jerry clunked me over the head when I first set eyes on him. Christ man, we've gotten old, but I see you're still *at it*. I cannot say I'll never do another reading, but poetry under a gas light, what the fuck have we changed, my old mentor?

What have we done? I speak the unspeakable, and you've retreated to New Orleans, still filling the same estuaries that when I was young, hit my cognitive hemispheres like speed. In a very real sense, the artistic outlet has more quietly disillusioned me, as well. The American Constitution allows the outlet, but does nothing to check the power of Jon Corzine, or Hank Paulson or the CEO of JP Morgan to float nonsensical trillions. I live on perhaps .00001% of their 6 billion dollar leak, and the best Homo Tweets can bleet at me is to "get help," in all the glory of his progressive vision of what social equality looks like, that says nothing to what my half-century of damnation has cost. Social work never made me happy, not really. The Matrix Research Institute gave me a small sense of the aphrodisiac of merit, something I paid a high price to experience. It will now take me about two hours to safely simulate a decent shower. Most of you never even have to think about this. I do, my lungs slowly suffocating on pus that feeds oxygen generating commercials, and I am still battling to live an absurdly decent life, stifling a jagged sob.