Understand me
A boy ruined my bed
He tore the sheets
A boy ruined my head
I am never at peace
Where did I go?
The mirror lies to me
Skin and body like dough
They bend for me
You took myself from me
You took my heart for free
My body is no longer mine
The mirror a cell
Nobody will love me
Like you
You failed me
You raped me
Of my dignity
Of my femininity
As a girl
You told me I wasn’t enough
You lied and I didn’t call
Your bluff
I was eight
As a woman
You took away my pride
I didn’t get to decide
The value of my privacy
Your insistence of on propriety
I was just blind
A cog in the machine
When I was only sixteen
Understand what you’ve done
Let me pick up the pieces
Before you hurt me again
Help me by leaving
Give me a reason
You’re not a man
Have mercy on me
Like I had on you
Leave me be
Give a man an inch
and he will take a mile
Phillips Head Screwed Driver
All alone she sits...
...At the edge of the world...
It feels like no one else exists...
...Perhaps they never really did.
What the fuck is this ‘life’?...
How can it really be alright,
And can we all achieve our
Dreams
When there are killers
In the wings?...
...Half-brained fuckwits
Who live to poison waterways.
Tonight I want a train
To come...
...My breath is heavy,
Hear the drum
Of someone’s heart
Who isn’t me...
...I know there is
So much to see,
But people follow
Strange commands!...
In fear of death,
And heavy hands...
All alone she sits...
...At the edge of the world...
It feels like no one else exists...
...Perhaps they never really did.
What the fuck is this ‘life’?...
How can it really be alright,
And can we all achieve our
Dreams
When there are killers
In the wings?...
Duck and cover!...
Take a dive!...
...But there are
Castles
In the sky,
As there’s a end
To that bleak cave
That covers up
Our light for days.
©
2018
Bunny Villaire
The Terror of the Banks
An address to the tyranny of the banking system; the greatest threat to civilization.
This is not another, socialism is the answer piece; or a woe is me “don’t forget about the little people” entreaty. I am writing to call to your attention the unconstitutionality of what the banking system is doing to the American people.
The banks are stripping Americans of their wealth, freedom, political access, social and economic mobility and in the process transforming society in virtually all areas to ensure they get their share of all profits. They buy political influence and have attached themselves to every monetary transaction. EVERY-SINGLE-ONE while siphoning off their “fee”. The economy has largely been growing on credit for more then 50 years; the governments credit and your credit. This is spurious growth, fake growth, illusionary growth built on bank profits and public debt. Median wages stagnate for decades while the price of everything goes up, so what little savings you may have had, has now has been gobbled up by the inflation monster.
Insurance companies and banks have attached their tendrils into all aspects of public life. What has allowed them to grow to MONOLITHIC proportions is credit. A house that cost $12,000.00 30 years ago is now $500,000.00 because some banker had the great idea to allow those who didn’t have $12,000.00 up front to borrow it (for a fee, of course) and pay it back over time. So that the $12,000.00 house by the time it was paid off cost double or triple that; then it just keeps compounding. This allowed the banks to begin increasing the prices of houses while offering more and more “mortgages” to help middle class americans “afford” it and give the illusion that the economy was growing. The price of housing is going up! Great! But who really benefits most from that? You guessed it! The banks.
Insurance works the same way. Doctors have gotten rich off this and the industry has been able to charge inhuman prices backed by insurance, while due to all the inflated prices of necessities Americans have been ensnared on the never ending treadmill of debt. It is this circumstance which has allowed prices to greatly out strip wages. Credit and insurance. This not what the founding fathers had in mind. If you couldn’t afford it you couldn’t buy it, this would have the natural effect of bringing prices down, a novel idea. If the majority of Americans couldn’t afford it, the doctors and hospitals and homeowners would have no choice but to charge much, much less. Who would this hurt? Yup! The banks!
Now some lending is necessary to grow the economy this is true. But the purpose of a bank is not to derive more and more creative ways to steal the people’s money so that they can make riskier and riskier investments; the original purpose of a bank was to form a partnership with its citizens; to lend money in order to serve the public good and grow the economy through this lending at a “reasonable interest rate”. It was not to strip the citizens of every dime they have to create the largest profits for its partners and shareholders. Unfortunately that is what it has become.
It largely started in secret at Jekyll Island in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve. An insatiable privately owned unconstitutional (it is unconstitutional of congress to abrogate responsibility of the the national currency to a private entity) monster of usury and theft; siphoning the public wealth through large and small measures. At times sabotaging the economy to close small businesses so that the larger corporations can buy up all the available real estate, and then, due to their exorbitant resources, massively increase the price of the property. At other times, banks are increasing their fee’s to the limits or the what the law allows them to charge which so disproportionately effects poor and lower income Americans to constitute blatant embezzlement. The boom and bust cycle we now find ourselves in started after the establishment of the Federal Reserve.
Banks make risky investments (with your money) to create larger and larger profits without consequence when they fail because either the government will bail them out or they will pass the debt onto the consumers. Middle class and working poor pay the bulk of this liability thru these outrageous fees and price increases. These policies overwhelmingly disproportionately effect middle and lower class Americas. Even though it is the money of these same citizens that the banks use to make these risky potentially high return investments; when banks guess right and make huge profits do they pass this onto the citizens who put the money up to begin with? Of course not, the banks simply continue to steal their money through huge fees and price gouges, which they have coerced the government to approve with very large campaign contributions. The policies, which banks propagate, only help the richest Americans, obviously.
The financial industry would cite “capitalism” as justification for this unethical behavior; but what they do not understand is the idea of capitalism is not to continue to manipulate the system to grow their wealth through usury and debt. Thomas Jefferson warned against allowing banks to move into a for profit model “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered. I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
“Give me control of a nations money supply, and I care not who makes it’s laws.” Do you know who said that? Nathan Rothschild, banker.
“He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation”: James Garfield.
This is coming to an end. It has too. Maybe this is naive and wishful thinking on my part, but the current system is unsustainable. Occupy was a start but quickly fizzled through a lack of a coherent message and organization; but the idea was right. Unfortunately the banks and corporations have the resources to wait out the people; it happens over and over.
I would like to know what happened to the idea of a partnership between banks and the community? How can there be a partnership when there is dishonesty and one participant is literally stealing the money of the other? Banks have completely lost their way and the whole reason for their existence.
Just Dropping In
It was the sixth grade. I had gotten my first period just a few months earlier; I thought I was dying, but my mom finally found my underwear and explained what was happening to me.
Anyway, I was running late for school. I had missed the bus, and my dad had to drop me off. In addition to being late, the mysterious period returned the night before, and in a panic I had shoved a handful of pads into my backpack to use once I was at school and hopefully alone in the girl's bathroom.
I burst into school, running to my locker. Of course, as one of the shortest people in my class, I had a top locker. The hallways were empty, muffled sounds of "learning" coming from the closed doors of classrooms.
I guess I will never know why, but the guy who was my bottom locker, Zach, was kneeling on the floor, digging through his locker when I rushed in that fateful morning. I wheezed a "hello" and began emptying my backpack into my locker, desperate to get to class as quickly as possible. But I forgot the essential I had packed.
In the process of emptying my bag, a pad had come loose from my things and floated down, down, down, right onto Zach's unsuspecting head.
He looked up, confused, then down at the floor.
"I didn't see it!"
"It's not mine!"
We each frantically repeated these phrases until Zach had the sense to get up and run back to class. I picked up the pad, stuffed it back into the deepest dredges of my backpack, and never made eye contact with him again.
Thankfully, he moved in the eighth grade.
My death
Earth, 2119. It’s the 100th anniversary of my death. It was a simple fall; something that I had been doing all my life and that my friends and family had always joked would be my demise. The face value of my death was so insignificant that you wouldn’t have read about it in the history books or heard about it on the news. When they said, “she died far too young,” and “her death is an unnecessary tragedy,” at my funeral they didn’t know how wrong they were. I actually died at the right time, in the right place for the right events to line up that prevented the pandemic that couldn’t be named. We were saved- at least for a little while.
--
If I hadn’t been there that day at that time, a mid-career biochemical engineer would have made it to the conference that they were scheduled to attend. The engineer would have been inspired by the ideas presented at the conference that would change the path of his career. The engineer would have made unprecedented advances in pharmaceuticals that were meant to ease the burden of lifetime ailments. The promise of such advancements would have caused unquellable excitement for those producing the drugs. The excitement would lead to an oversight in disposal safety. The disposal of the byproducts of these drugs would mutate to become the most dynamic and deadly disease that mankind had ever seen. It would move swiftly through the population and no one would be safe from it. The virus would mutate so fast that the defenses produced wouldn’t stand a chance. The time from the day that the virus developed to the day that humankind would end would have been 25 days; it moved so swiftly though the population that it was impossible to establish a name. In the following years, cities would have been overrun with weeds and wildlife. Earth would flourish and by year 2119 it would have almost been as though humans were never here.
--
On the day of my death, a young child flipped a coin into the fountain of a hotel. A biotechnologist that was scheduled to speak at a conference saw the child flip the coin into the fountain and was compelled to intervene. The biotechnologist fished the coin out of the fountain while explaining to the child that it was wasteful and that wishing upon things was not a scientifically sound process of making things happen. Water that was on the biotechnologists hand dripped onto the floor as the child looked at the coin in dismay. As the biochemical engineer was on their way to the biotechnologists conference, they witnessed a person slipping in a small puddle of water and falling to hit their head on the corner of the fountain’s ledge. The trajectory of the fall was at such an angle that the hit caused death almost instantly. The biochemical engineer missed the conference out of an obligation to speak to police about the incident that they witnessed. The inspiration did not occur, their career remain constant, the drugs were not created, there was no byproduct to evolve into the most dangerous disease man ever knew. Humanity was safe- or at least it was supposed to be.
--
Instead of humans being wiped from Earth, they continued on as they always had. There were too many people using too many resources causing too much strain on Earth. Over the following 100 years, famine, illness, and man to man brutality extinguished most of humanity. There are a few left sporadically around Earth- those who had prepared for this type of thing and have done everything that they could to fight for their little slice of Earth. They won’t last much longer, no one will.
Earth 2119. It’s the 100th anniversary of my death.
Clock
I watch the clock, waiting for a minute to tick by. Waiting for my life to change - one way or another. It doesn't. I'm not surprised.
Black checkmarks of monotony cover everything I do, spilling from my fingers like old blood. I find myself wasting away. Is work my entire existence?
My shift ends and clouds are dark and heavy, but they never break with rain. The sky mirrors my life; I don't have anything to give, either.
The clock seems to be frozen as I rock my numbered days away, pouring empty memories into a shakily crocheted blanket. Why I'm making it, I don't know. I have no children, no grandchildren, no legacy at all. I will die as I've lived: boring and alone.