The percentage you're paying is too high priced
While you're living beyond all your means
And the man in the suit has just bought a new car
From the profit he's made on your dreams


Christian Chaize, Praia Piquinia, August 20, 2005

Conversation Starter
-- by Klipschutz

Roman Polanski made some good movies,
okay, even great ones.
He suffered in epic proportion as a boy
(his mother died at Auschwitz).
His tie-in with the Svengali of Death Valley,
Charles Manson, was another tragedy-bearing episode
in a life made up of them, links in a chain.

He also slept with the sexiest women on the planet.
Not able to leave such outsize luck alone,
one of these women was a thirteen year-old girl
on Quaaludes provided by a legend’s common-law wife.

In the spirit of the times, Polanski bought and wangled
his way out of the legal stink, skipping the country
while the skipping was good, to be safe,

and was still considered a fugitive in the United States
when arrested thirty years later in Zurich
and bound over for extradition,
which one year on Switzerland denied.

Friendships ended, marriages went wrong
over his fate, this genius in his seventies,
who did an awful thing, and got caught, twice.
The comment streams on blogs did overflow.

Can I be sad for everyone? Try and stop me.
I’m tired of being angry. Be my guest.
Anger can be useful. Point to you.
She is deaf and dumb now too? Point to you.

Times change, wheels of fortune spin around.
What yesterday was up today is down.

Italic couplet signifying what? A nod to yore?
This is history, this is human drama.
It doesn’t get much more lurid or polarizing.


The Finger
-- by Charles Bukowski

the drivers of automobiles
have very little recourse or
originality.
when upset with
another
driver
they often give him the
FINGER.

I have seen two adult
men
florid of face
driving along
giving each other the
FINGER.

well, we all know what
this means, it's no
secret.

still, this gesture is
so overused it has
lost most of its
impact.

some of the men who give
the FINGER are captains of
industry, city councilmen,
insurance adjusters,
accountants and/or the just plain
unemployed.
no matter.
it is their favorite
response.

people will never admit
that they drive
badly.

the FINGER is their
reply.

I see grown men
FINGERING each other
throughout the day.

it gives me pause.
when I consider
the state of our cities,
the state of our states,
the state of our country,
I begin to
understand.

the FINGER is a mind-
set.
we are the FINGERERS.
we give it
to each other.
we give it coming and
going.
we don't know how
else to respond.

what a hell of a way
to not
live.