So let us now place monetary value on information.
Let us return to the source,
Mining & prospecting that fertile intel seam.
To wit: WWII and G-2 shenanigans.
Wild Bill and OSS-capades,
Artificial disseminations.
Partial recriminations.
And PSYOPS:
A literary nightmare--
THE CYCLOPS from The Odyssey,
For example,
If you lack your own,
Your own personal Bogey Man.
Or men. For me:
Allen Dulles or Richard Helms.

The Intelligence Community:
It was a small tightly knit crew,
Less than battalion strength in 1942;
A few myopic soldiers,
Who, although could barely type,
Were still too cerebral to
Waste as infantry fodder.
It was a huge converted Army-green warehouse,
Space strategically partitioned,
Sectioned off into cubicle-like spaces,
By giant 4-drawer file cabinets
Standing tall like MPs,
Sentinels & Guardians,
Monuments to pre-electronic storage,
Data relatively comprehensive, and an
Archive secretive & intimidating.

Within the Army-green incunabula,
Scattered throughout the intel landscape,
Here and there a few commissioned officers,
A smattering of college psychology majors,
Personalities with predilections,
And penchants for mind games.
These self same WWII vets,
Would morph into Cold War Mad Men.
Stalwart, stouthearted men of Eisenhower,
And J. Walter Thompson,
De-mobbed, as they say in the UK.
Consumptive.
Self-indulgent,
Particularly when it came to the kids;
Children of the peace,
Called Baby-Boomers,
An entire generation enabled & destroyed.
Who would produce little of value
Except medical marijuana and
Coupons, clipped by that sober ruling class—
Fat interest-bearing college-loan portfolios
Held by that neo-Calvinist Elect: The 1%.
Fat cats one and all,
Loaded dice & canasta cronies--
In concert a stacked deck,
“Una mano lava l'altra.”
The words of my namesake--
My grandfather Giuseppe--
His vowels reverberating,
Rattling in my dreams.
Not friends, but
Fiends in high places, like
The Fed and dark liquid pools.
Thank you, Barack, for
Fooling us again.
For giving us
“Belief we can believe in.”

But I digress.
It was when the Government Secrecy Act,
In all its transnational incarnations,
Embraced capitalism in a big way,
Elevating the ideology to whole-Earth saturation,
Systemizing the ethos of Darwin,
Into one global Moby ****,
One solitary leviathan,
A multi-level marketing labyrinth,
Where wealth is the end game--
Greed: pure, unbridled & unrestrained.
Bond--James Bond—
Did his bit, supplying catchy
Slogans & tag-lines:
“For Your Eyes Only.”
“On a need to know basis.”
“Confidential Information.”
“Top & Ultra-Top Secret.”
“Hush, Hush & a Bag of Chips.”

The sealed letter sits in a locked drawer,
In that stout desk,
In the Oval Office
In The White House,
“To be opened by my VP in the event of my death.”
Another staggering work,
Of achy-achy-heart breaking genius,
The culture commoditized,
A disease containing its own cure,
Assayed, graded,
Portioned & packaged.
Priced accordingly,
To a logic that goes something like:
“Anything this tightly controlled,
Anything the government deems to be
This illegitimate and/or & secret
Must be really, really God-awesome,
Must really be Da ******* Bomb.”

Brother Coolidge was right:
“The Business of America is Business.”
And INFORMATION:
“The Most Valuable Commodity on Earth.”
So said Stanford Stuyvesant Whitehead III,
19th Century robber baron, and
Consummate Fat Cat.
Get the picture:
We were smoking cigars and sipping cognac,
Mighty comfortable in leather armchairs,
Muted billiard clicks,
Punctuating the atmosphere
In this spacious lounge,
His East Side
Downtown & private
Manhattan club.
I, his guest, had not the slightest idea
Why I was there.
"By God, man," he went on,
My eyes speared by his laser gaze,
His bushy eyebrows,
His monocle.
His bulbous nose;
His thick wet mustache.
And those EYES:  
Those crazy,
Insane eyes.

"I am talking about a profound change,” he continued.
“Back when the steamship
Gave way to electronic wireless radio."
He puffed smoke,
Removing the cigar from his mouth,
Holding it,
Examining it critically for a moment.
"I'm talking about communication,
Instant communication
With business associates, &
Cronies far away,
Way out there,
Far beyond the places we know well.
Picture it:
You're running a fleet of
Ramshackle Filipino banana boats,
Out of some nameless cove,
Indenting the south coast of Mindanao.
A cyclone comes out of nowhere.
Good God--there’s sixteen banana-packed
Coal burners lying on the bottom of the Celebes Sea.
Think about it:
You've got telegraph radio.
Everyone else has the post office.
Now, I ask you:
‘Who's going long,
Who’s getting rich on the
Caracas Banana Exchange?’
Good Lord, man, it would be
Like being omniscient!"
“This very conversation,” he went on,
“Could well be a verbatim transcription
Of a conversation right here in this very room,
Between people like: J. Pierpont Morgan
And some lesser Gilded Age nabob;
Some Astor, some Rockefeller,
A Gould or Vanderbilt,
Whitney or Duke,
Some Frick or Warburg--
To name just a few, old sport.”
He stopped suddenly.
He looked down at his hands,
As we both realized he had counted these names
Out on his fat curled fingers.
He looked at me and smiled.
I was afraid.
Why had I been invited to this meeting?
I smiled back at him,
Doing my best to mirror his
Carnivorous menace.

I knew it.
He knew it.
He knew I knew it.
Mr. Whitehead’s growling rabid jowls,
His slobbering canine smile held me steady.
“Okay. Touché. ‘Ya got me.”
He shook off the phony smile,
An absence, accentuating
His stare: lethal, carnal & rare.
“I never had much formal schooling.
I’ve been hungry.
Hungry enough to know for sure
That the correct fork,
Don’t mean ***** from shinola.
When I’m dining out, fancy-like,
Me manners is the least of me problems,
Far less important than
The dinner chit they
Hand me after I slake
My thirst & appetite.”
Again, he stopped suddenly,
Recognizing that, perhaps,
He’d revealed too much of his
Bedford-Stuyvesant pedigree.
He turned again and stared at me.
“None of that,” he said.
“None of that means squat to me, Boyo.
What matters now is I’m rich.
I’ve got mine, By God,
And ******* It!
Tough ***** on the rest of you losers;
The rest of you fecking whiners can go
**** yourselves over at Zuccotti Park.”
He pounded the armrest,
The padded armrest of the rich Corinthian leather—
( . . . ***, Ricardo?
Get your Montalbán
Mexicano ***, back in
Random Access Memory Land,
Where you belong.
**** ya’ Fantasy Island
Hospitality, Mr. Roarke,
Go be wrathful Khan Noon Singh,
Somewhere else.
Now is not the time, or,
Let me rephrase that:
This narrative will not allow your meme here . . .)    

Whitehead pounds the armrest again.
“My point is this:  
None of JP Morgan’s decidedly,
un-nattering lesser nabobs of negativity . . .”
BAM!  Again, he pounded the leather . . .

(Back in your ******* hole, Spiro!
Do you realize just how far back,
Just how far back
Maryland’s reputation
Has been set back by your venality?
Not to mention any shot at ethnic assimilation,
The rest of us grease ball non-Wasps
Have in this country?
You ******* Greek!)

I stopped thinking
When I realized Stanford Stuyvesant Whitehead III
Was reading my mind.
“So that’s what it’s really all about,” he said,
Rank smugness in his voice.
“So, I’m just a nouveau riche upstart,
A socially inept parvenu,
Yet they still let me
Join their tony clubs.
It chaps your ***, Boyo, don’t it?
I’m still Scotch-Irish, and
A WASP, Laddie.
Something your skinny
Greaser-Guinea-****-Spaghetti-*** ***,
Ain’t ever gonna be.”
But I digress, again.

So I joined one of Uncle Sam’s
Lesser-known clandestine services,
An assignment appropriate to my ethnic identity,
Namely GLADIO in Italy,
A NATO stay-behind operation &
Cold-War comedy.
I infiltrated the Brigate Rosse.
I drove the Aldo Moro kidnap vehicle.
I cooked minestrone for General Dozier.
I sliced off J. Paul Getty’s ear in Calabria.
Ironically, I lost my hearing during
The Stazione Bologna bombing.
I am consequently pensioned off,
Off both the radar and the payroll.
Years later now,
I live in one of those gated, golf-coursed,
Over-55, sunny southern California
Lunatic asylums.

Most days I am drunk at 9 AM.
I fill Bukowski mornings,
Conjuring up Jane Fonda,
Jazzercised in camo spandex.
She is high atop a Vietcong tank in Hanoi.
Or Daniel Ellsberg
Enjoying a second act in American politics,
Praising Snowden & Assange,
& Bradley Manning,
I summon up the ghosts of
Julius & Ethel,
Benedict Arnold,
Rose of Tokyo & Mata Hari—
And Ezra exiled at Rapallo,
And John Walker Lindh,
A Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Born in Washington,
District of Columbia,
By way of Afghanistan,
Taliban Americano,
Kangaroo-courted,
Presently residing at the
Federal Correctional Institution
At Terre Haute, Indiana.
Spies.
Traitors.
Saboteurs.
And Poets?
No longer capable of keeping secrets.
Desperate now to tell
The truth.

You constructed a towering cathedral out of popsicle sticks
and blue Lego pieces, searching for deeper meaning
through building a foundation from discarded dreams
and stuttered melodies. I listened as you played folk and bluegrass covers on your acoustic guitar, wondering if we would ever cross our arms into a figure-eight on a rainy morning,
in the middle of a fire-fight between the Vietcong
and Francis Coppola.

Remember when we watched “Lost in Translation” and you asked did I feel isolated and anxious around large groups of white people? I wanted to nod, but instead
I smoked green out of an apple and ate the core,
as smoke lingered under my chin. You tapped my shoulder,
stared me down, and forced a grin, as though you knew
my answer would be nothing but manufactured nouns and verbs, gibberish, and Pig-Latin with no room for form, or design.

The sun belted heat rays down on our tired faces, stopping only
when a Mac Demarco song crooned from the boom-box on the
patio table and as we heard the beat and the lyrics,
we took shots of fireball and had a discussion on EDM festivals
and the rise of smartphones capturing moments of racism
and hatred with each video, each picture.

I wanted to read “Kafka on The Shore” to a six tennis players
from my country club, but they were too busy
staging a protest for an increase in minimum wage jobs
and besides Murakami spoke with a thick Japanese accent,
which turned off white people who revered his prose.
A shame you didn’t draw a faux Calvin and Hobbes
comic strip about Susi Derkins finding nirvana
in watching “Game of Thrones” while sleep-deprived
and eating half a bar of Xans. We drank the entire bottle
of Captain Morgan’s and still Drake’s Uncharted story mode
didn’t seem any less fascinating.

Your cousin Bonnie crashed
a white Ford Mustang into the back of U-Street Music Hall
and I cringed as I rode shotgun, the airbag releasing and smacking into my ruddy face, all the life I’d lived gleaming
beneath the shadowy figure I bought last weekend
at the thrift shop on West Broad Street.

You could have come over last Thursday to listen to
me play jazz on the piano for Epicure’s open mic night,
but you were too busy playing saxophone on the veranda
in Georgetown’s Waterfront and anyhow,
you wanted a relationship forged on trust and great ***,
and I could barely get out of my townhouse without
writing a diary entry etched in bone marrow and angel dust,
plus you told me, “I love your imaginary brother.”
And all I have is a teddy bear named Franklin.
You could have come over last Thursday to listen to
me play jazz on the piano for Epicure’s open mic night,
but you were too busy playing saxophone on the veranda
in Georgetown’s Waterfront and anyhow,
you wanted a relationship forged on trust and great ***,
and I could barely get out of my townhouse without
writing a diary entry etched in bone marrow and angel dust,
plus you told me, “I love your imaginary brother.”
And all I have is a teddy bear named Franklin.
You could have come over last Thursday to listen to
me play jazz on the piano for Epicure’s open mic night,
but you were too busy playing saxophone on the veranda
in Georgetown’s Waterfront and anyhow,
you wanted a relationship forged on trust and great ***,
and I could barely get out of my townhouse without
writing a diary entry etched in bone marrow and angel dust,
plus you told me, “I love your imaginary brother.”
And all I have is a teddy bear named Franklin.

A pack of cigarettes, some gum,
some condoms, and $50 were stuffed
into his cargo pocket, in his left hand
a 9 millimeter, 10 rounds in the clip
he spotted a dead Vietcong.....

                                                              Yellow and scrawny....
                                                             a bullet through his right eye
                                                             his brains seeping out of his skull....

                     A little girl, walking down the dirt field road
                     a rice bowl in her right hand,
                    a bayonet in the left, it was covered in blood

Up the road, he spotted a fire,
the sounds of AK-47's whipping through the wind
a pile of bodies stuffed on top of each other

                             Ears and fingers wrapped around bare skinned necks
                                                                       the smell of rotten flesh....

                        To the south, a *******
                        high heel boots, lace *******
                        and a mini skirt, unkempt hair, pitch-black
                        red lipstick and hazel colored eyes
                        $50 for a hand-job, $75 for a *******
                        $100 for one hours and $200 for two
                       condoms still stuffed in the cargo pocket

                    A back alley, a sloppy *******
                    the ****** broke.....

                                                              The gum is still wrapped in foil,
                                              unwrapped, slowly chewed, sweet then bitter
                                           the roar of helicopters and the blast of grenades
                                                         American flags ripped and set on fire
                                                  A single bullet, a silent gasp.....

Ripples of effulgent colors
Reaching out from waters disturbed
Waves bothering no one
Except silent moods
And heavy sighs

Leaves falling like the fire from the skies
Sitting at the river bed alone
Hearing the blazing trumpets of angels
In the air for all of the world to hear
Definite, gazing and profound

The streets echoing the screams
Of thousands
Maybe millions burning
The people melting
turning to ash

And

Visions so pristine, with pools of clear waters
Where the universe dances with shooting stars
Nights so serene, with comets and saucers
Where multi-verse poets tell fables from mars

Mirrors orbiting realms of light and sound
Along ghost ships, serpents and mango worlds
Wormholes overwhelms clouds that surround
Near women’s hips and flowing hair swirls

The earths below like a burning molten orb of muck
Where Rephaite giants wrestle behemoths in vile seas
The dreams glow here like a harem where angels ****
And centaurs play Gato Barbieri tunes full of gleam

And

That sad moment where I wake up in an ***** pit
Below the Broadway theater
And a little Chinese lady scoots me out for new customers
And I stumble out into the streets
And buy a paper
Reading of a stock market crash
and the end of my job

as I fend for life in the jungles of Vietnam
I see friends of mine get their faces shot to pieces
And their brains fall to my lap
And I scream as the Vietcong rush me
Hack my limbs off and leave me for dead
And I wake up in a hospital bed
A quadruple amputee
Falling in love with a nurse I might never see
Again, so I ask her to hold me and let me
Cry into her shoulder
Then I pay a homeless man
to push me off a bridge with him

We fall and hit the water hard and—
He sinks
I don’t
I float up to the surface
And when I emerge I see
myself at the edge of a river
Tossing rocks into the water
I call out to help
But He doesn’t hear me

He stands up and leaves
I crawl up from the river with new arms and legs
Crying with an emotion I cannot describe
For what dreams and past-lives have been here
And there
On this Day of Wrath?

On this beach of trash and rocks?

Where I can see my grand-kids playing
In the southern California dusk

And my wife reminds me of the first time we met
In that hospital
Next to the ***** den
At the end of the world.

I want to build
an epic blanket fort
so deep and tall
you'd think the
vietcong dug it
warm walls to sink into
until you can barely
Breathe
like drowning in comfort
I would never come out

It is very difficult to explain what someone means to you who you've never met. I suppose we all have our heroes and those we admire greatly. But beyond admiration, sometimes there is someone who has an effect on how you view the world; an effect that shatters your naiveté and profoundly opens the door of the human mind, personal behavior and possibility. For me, Muhammad Ali was that person.

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

That one quote of his is all you need to know about the man. It transcends sports and the violence of his chosen profession. And while we all admire the sheer will of his being to over-come a near death experience in order to win a fight, it was his willingness to accept ridicule, scorn and accusations of treason or of being a coward that showed how much more his will was than just beating up another man.

As a child I was loved boxing and studied up on its history, especially the heavyweight division. I was aware of Jack Dempsey and the long count, Joe Louis and how he fought Max Schmelling, the pride of **** Germany and how Joe came knocked him out in the first round after a previous loss to Max, but then later in life he became friends with Joe Louis and assisted his former rival financially in his later years, eventually financing his military] funeral in 1981. , Rocky Marciano and his undefeated record and Sonny Liston with his terrifying scowl. But to me Muhammad was the greatest of them all because he combined power and speed. He could fight like a middle-weight and stand toe to toe with the strongest men who entered the ring with him.

But all of that suddenly didn’t seem to matter when I learned that he refused to go to Vietnam. At the time, like so many of you I was a child. All I knew about the war was the child-like fantasy that our soldiers were supermen and that we were going to win the war. We were the good guys. And yet here was this black man, so known to me suddenly refusing to go. I learned about a phrase called “conscientious objector.” I wondered how a person could just say they wouldn’t go because it was against their religion; especially if this same person was savagely beating people in the ring. It was a dichotomy that I do not fully understand even to this day. I wondered how a man who had the courage to enter the ring and fight would be called a coward by other men who would never challenge him to a fist-fight. I wondered about hating our own country and saying that he had no reason to hate the Vietcong. I wondered about what our country had done to blacks over the years and how maybe, just maybe they had a point.

And I wondered about becoming a Black Muslim and changing his name while calling his former name, his "slave name."

These things all entered the mind of a child. And I didn’t know what to think. But as time passed and he continued on as a boxer, I continued to admire his skills. I admired the way he carried himself after his defeat against Joe Frazier in their first fight. That was a shock to me because I thought Ali to be almost god-like in his skills and the way he lived life. But then he came back and later defeated Frazier twice. It taught me that we can be great even with a blemish as he was no longer undefeated.

And then came George Foreman; another terrifying man in the ring. Even more terrifying than Sonny Liston. Nobody thought Ali would win. But win he did and it was the greatest victory of all; because it was a modern day tale like David versus Goliath; Ali showed how his mind was his greatest weapon and how it can help a person overcome any odds; any disadvantage if they are willing to use and believe in themselves. Again, the possibilities of life were presented to me. You can do it another way.

But you have to believe in yourself.

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

And now these words mean so much to me because I believe I have not wasted the past thirty years of my life. I believe I have changed. And I believe I am now able to consider all possibilities before I decide what I believe and how I should judge the actions of another person. Though we are taught not to judge we find ourselves in situations where we are forced to judge. And when a man refuses to serve while another man does serve, giving his life for his country, then it is hard not to judge. And I’m not here to tell you that Ali was right not to go because I know I have friends who went along with their Fathers. And they deserve every honor and not a message that they died in vain. But what Ali did was make me think about the future and a world where a young man should not be forced to give his life for the ambitions of another man. Or the fears of another man. It taught me to think about peace and love. And to understand the culture and burden carried by another man.

Because not everyone is raised by loving parents. Not everyone was born free and made to feel special. Not everyone can live a life of relative ease.

And very few have the courage to live their life by their conscience. Muhammad Ali was that type of man. A black man in America, straddling the times of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A black man living in a time of hate and violence. A MUSLIM black man who saw a CHRISTIAN black man assassinated for speaking out for TRUTH, JUSTICE AND LOVE.

All I can say to my children is that this man WAS A MAN.

RIP Muhammad. You rose before us all and now you can take your place among angels who stand waiting for your great soul.

When rip tiding sliding ravaging
And questioning that equestrian suggestion
Making hesitations about the lack of vegetation
Due to global microwaves
And that came straight from the horse’s mouth
Or you can doubt
Tom
Mr. Doubting
Tom
Like we should’ve doubted Vietnam
Dropping all types of incendiary bombs
On the unseen,
untouched trails
of the ghost like Vietcong
And that is not to be doubted
Or creating a hatred so absurd and obtuse
loosely based
on History, relatives and carrying their ******* baggage
Through the years.
I’d rather smoke and drink beers until I am bleeding out ears of corn
And then maybe we could feed somebody in this rat race.
This ******* place.
I mean, great city and all
But it stinks like **** out there.  And you know it.

so... if pensions make so fiscal sense?
why is there a counter
argument against suicide on
existentialists grounds?

please, elaborate...

   so a pension makes no sense?
why wouldn't the excuse
for suicide make perfect sense?!

so if people are not making any profit,
not juggernaut progress for a company?
**** it!
      economic euthanasia....
please! alleviate me from the misery!

i won't mind... i minded
petting cats... a cat a man...
  a head is a head on a stump of wood...
i've seen a chicken get decapitated
watching the remaining
chickens congregate in
in a cannibalistic fashion...

just prior to the eyes rolling into
a whiteness, dead...
      and the chicken sipping
the old testament Nile...

               so if pensions make
no fiscal sense?
       then debt makes the similarity
of the sense of paying it back...
but then suicide?
            there is no argument...
suicide has not existential argument
at this point...
you're excused..
    jesus christ, who?

thích quảng Đức

    jesus christ, who?
            lampshade hanging...
jew what who?
  
                    so.................................

no retirement plan?
no retirement payment?

oh...

                  sloth donkey works his
existence to a death,
no memory cinema....

   thanks!

                    there were never
ever any suicide arguments
worth a counter....
but there are now...
  
               i can excuse suicide...
when i can't excuse
this economic revisionism...

              the suicide is excused...
given that the already imposed
economic model is already
turned to fission of
a lacking doubt of post-script
implementation...

              just listen to the right song...
and then hang...
               ha ha! a crucifix!
   teach-quang-dhoo...
    must be Vietcong -
a letter with two diacritical marks"

  
     what's the point?
  i've seen the end...
         and the end...
            is what ends the present.