The Debt We All Owe

to Society at large
our investments look wiser than they really are
the expert onlooker gets a cataract smile
as he explains why you lose

in the halls of Congress
aged beef guy apologizes
for bowing down before business
marked with the Crest of the Lord

all in a day’s work
all better than before
except for the part
where we get greedy and dumb

to Society the map
gets browner and kind of swirly
the expert talking point tells us to buy
even as the moon goes sour

in the walls of houses
dark mold man fraternizes
with evil spirits made movie stars
under the guise of Abraham

all in a days’s work
all better than before
except for the part
where we get greedy and dumb

to Society at large
our containment tries to stop the rising tide
the expert predictor make an unlikely guess
as he explains why you lose

in the minds of scholars
ancient wisdom can be re-directed
to a nicer place much easier
to comprehend

all in a day’s work
all better than before
except for the part
where we get greedy and dumb

Cincinnati

I first moved to Cincinnati in 1978, after spending the winter in a rented lakeside house in Rockaway, New Jersey, with my cousin Mike and two other knuckleheads like ourselves. My car had no gas gauge or working windshield wipers and I still remember driving into New York City in freezing rain as Mike wielded what he called the “magic stick”, a long chunk of wood he used to move the wipers while leaning his right arm out the window and into the elements.

I moved to a huge farmhouse outside of Bethany, Ohio, which is close to Cincinnati, now akin to a suburb. Close friends were renting it, complete with much land and two large barns, and they had invited me to rent one of two apartments upstairs.
At that time you could stand in the front yard, near an intersection of two country roads, and gaze at fields of grain and corn all around. Today, the farmhouse and the barns and fences are all gone, replaced by condominiums and a large sunken pond at the corner of the now-enlarged intersection.
Somewhere I have a photograph of a double rainbow against a gray sky overlooking broad crop fields, shot from where that pond now resides.

Day 1: the blank page

This is day one of this blog and I face the blank page with little fear because no one knows of its existence.
I have no agenda other than to try to make sense of things in my usual mixed up way, by means of words that, hopefully, might convey something of my experiences and observations of this world as seen from the middle.

I was born in a town called Middletown.
This town happens to be in Ohio, but there are Middletowns spread all over this vast country. The name itself might bring to mind something soaked in Americana, or quietly standing in for the solid values of the so-called Middle Class. It might sound a bit dull, or lacking in a strong identity of its own. That name: "Middletown". Middle of what? In the case of my birthplace, it is a small town located in the middle of Cincinnati and Dayton. But it could also evoke the middle-ground between this and that, between the high and the low, the common and the exceptional.
Is the middle-ground always a place where compromise rules? Where things are neither allowed to reach their soaring pinnacle nor languish from lack of attention? Is it a kind of limbo?

I was born the middle child of three children, all born in Middletown. We were all born four years apart. I was born on October 13 just a couple of minutes before midnight on a night when the moon was full. I don't know how much I believe in astrology but I am a Libran and much of my personality conforms to the usual descriptions of this sign. Part of this is the idea of being a mediator, one who tries to bring opposing sides together...in the middle.

I am no genius. Neither am I an idiot. I exist somewhere in between, with occasional rises and falls in either direction.