TUMBLING 
                                           by Geoff Garwick
 
I.   The   Abs.
 
                     A breath—that’s short—bikini brief short.
                     Chest rises.  Chest Falls.   Then our scene ends.
                     It’s curtains for you.  A meteor is slower
                     When compared to a star’s orbit, 
                     Than human life’s flickering trends.
 
                     Air twisting gymnast soars wingless,
                     Dwarfed by the towering high bar.
                     Floating weightless in the giant’s
                     Apogee for shards of a second,
                     Where the flyer lives lighter than a star.
 
                     Leaves float for hours, days, years,
                     Compared to the human pause atop.
                     Brains and muscles flip us higher,
                     Brave, amazing aerial displays
                     But in wink’s time, we--still—must drop.
 

II.   The Skin and Drippy Nose.
 
                     In my  chameleon-weathered homeland
                     We are amazingly well-seasoned:
                     Oregano, ginger, chipotle and cumin
                     Have nothing on us at all.
                     But merely calling the plunge “autumn”
                     Won’t dull the pain when we hit bottom.   


III.   The Scapulae and Wishbone.
 
                         Watch that well-greased first step,
                         You who, soon a little lower than angels
                         Formerly looking up to you,
                         Now clutch wings requiring glue.
 
                         You’ll miss the feathers most, 
                         No longer a morning person,
                         Meteoring for uprushing
                         Ground, where, unfledged, you’ll be crushing
 
                         De-aeried favorite son,
                         Epaulets and pinions gone,
                         Blaze snuffed by exile’s pall
                         For long, lonely years you’ll fall.
 
                         Heaven’s best becomes its dreck
                         When the plucked throne hits the deck,
                         Now mortals must clean up the wreck
                         Of dull wings driven through your neck.
                  
IV.   The Rib and Teeth
    
                          Reptile.
                          Defile. 
                          Beguile.
 
                          No-no fruit:
                          Bitten cute.
                          Sharing loot.
 
                          PLUNGE FROM GRACE.
                          LOST OUR PLACE:
                          SWORD IN FACE.
 
                           The Eve of nude.
                           Sweat dropping, crude.
                           Birth pangs turn rude.
 
V.   The Pelvis  and the Femur                          
                         
                          How many light bulbs does it take
                          To help a crucial bone to break?
                          I hear it requires only one
                          If a ladder guarantees the fun.
 
                          If you’re not yet drooled or mumbling
                          Begin the collapse by stumbling.
                          In a fall from gravity’s grace,
                          Smash at least one  joint, then replace.
 
                          The down escalator’s rumbling
                          As you slouch toward  further crumbling.
                          When legs slither after  bones are burst
                          The crowd assumes your mental worst.
 
                          Abcess-minded bits of bumbling
                          Unleash mosquito stings of humbling,
                          In the mornings the geezer crawls
                          Until its damned London Bridge falls.
          
VI.   The  Midbrain and the Heart
 
                            Yearning and yearning, quasar-lashed,
                            Paired stars gyre about a new
                            Fulcrumed, formerly empty, point.
                            A jet of fusing synergy
                            Sweeps from the rotating partners.
 
                            Their center does not fold--
                            Not origami; tempered edge.
                            What chimera'ed beast measures self
                            By dear circumnavigations     
                            Of the incoiled, twined other?
 
                            WE, screaming “now”, dive into love,
                            Seals lost, beaks gaped, talons flared,
                            Tearing hungrily into our
                            Own deepest  viscera to feed
                            Ravening chicks of  hopeful melds.
 
                            Sloughing off  lost Jerusalems,
                            The universe drops pulled-out strings,
                            Which dared to exist outside of we --
                            Extruding what’s not Gemini,
                            The sad fey shadows beyond us.
 
VII.   The Wrist and Phalanges
          
                            Dice play at
                            Being divine.
                            Randomly crying.
                            Through infinite games.


© Copyright  Geoffrey Byron Garwick.  All Rights Reserved.

MORE  WHITTLING  AWAY  on  “The MUDDLED MIDDLERS”,  
AMERICA’S EMBATTLED  &  IMPERILED  MIDDLE  CLASS...
 
                                                 By Dr. Geoffrey B. Garwick
 
In the first of my three-part series on the dwindling and deprivileging of the USA’s middle class ( see The Diction Aerie’s Guest Forum, March 4, 2016 post )  I reviewed a few of the less-publicized indicators of this financial topsoil loss,  an erosion that is producing  a mammoth and engulfing Dead Zone in our national sense of community.  In this essay I turn not to some shadowy figure of hope who never appears  -- as in Samuel Beckett’s play, “Waiting for Godot” --  but to the ubiquitous phone menus we routinely  wrestle with when calling nearly any business nowadays.  Examining such supposedly beneficial time-saving systems, we are witnessing more of the thousand cruel cuts taken from the non-rich, whether they’re ensnared and likely forever lower class, or destined to be future lower class.  Or even the would-be middle class citizens. 
 
Albert Einstein in his relativity articles posited the amazing interchangeability of energy and matter.   His equations also rested on the intimate intertwining of space and time.  That same spirit of transformation holds when tycoons, balked by any strenuous or rote-work activity, complain that “time is money”.  They mean, of course, that said tycoon – who like an Orwellian Animal Farm elite is “more equal than others” -- stands to earn so much money per precious minute that every stray second must be seized to harvest even more billowing income.  This striving for time efficiency almost never seems to extend to the tycoon’s underlings, such as secretaries and servants, whose sole sad raison d’etre  is to waste as many of their minutes puttering about to meet every whim demanded by said tycoon.  A few examples are shared below of  procedures and circumstances which waste the previous time of the unrich, particularly the middle class or those aspiring to fight their way toward becoming bona fide Middlers.

*  THOSE @#$% VOICEMAIL MENUS:  Phone menus are valuable for companies insofar as they replace or substantially minimize the need for receptionists or inquiry responders.  However, it should be remembered that these eliminated phone jobs, if covered by people in the USA (not Mumbai or Manila) who are properly trained and empowered so they could be of maximum help, would go a long way to boosting the domestic inventory of America’s desperately needed lower-middle-class jobs.
 
Now, getting down to the nitty gritty -- do the phone menus actually assist any folks who are calling?  It is unclear if their often incomplete or overlapping categories ever help most customers, but they can be especially vexing, even infuriating, for first time users.  Just sitting through a long-winded robo-recitation of all the categories which do not fit a novice’s needs can be time-consuming.   But most galling are the times when what is required  is a human being with flexibility and encouragement, virtues by which people possess key advantages over machines.   Among the critical signals that a menu is  designed as a token, not an aid, to customers are those damnable lists which never offer you some version of a “speak to a representative” option, or which by demonic frequency only offer a non-functioning or utterly incorrect phone number.
                   
Who among us does not  have to wrestle with  phone menus?  Answer – only those wealthy enough to hire minimum wage go-fers to call and wait on the line for them, or families in which someone stays at home all day.   Who is most stressed by being dependent on such menus?: those  struggling to reach or stay in the middle class, possibly working two or three adult jobs per family.  They are often sleep-deprived, quality-time impoverished, and starved for recreation.  For folks already time-poor, the two, three, four, or more minutes wasted on listening to idiotic useless categories can be unbearably painful ancillary indignities to the core frustration of never finding the info they hoped for in the first place.    
       
*   DAY CARE:  There are basically two situations in which American families are able to afford day care:  if it’s subsidized by an employer or the government, or if the family is already affluent.  This means that some parents use relatives or non-working (and generous) friends or the two parents work different shifts to mitigate the need for day care.   It is a given that unless you can afford to hire nannies, sleep and many other healthful activities are already endangered by raising children and having full-time jobs.  The working poor cannot finance daycare on their own and may lose daycare subsidies when they start to earn an income above the starvation level.   Until the price of daycare is subsidized at higher levels so that it does not eviscerate a poor family’s budget, child-raising for the middle or working class family often means that there is one less wage earner.  
 
 
*   HUMANLESS  BILLING  SYSTEMS:   Recalling that a critical element of many financial communications is to make the use of “expensive" customer contacts with humans; bills whether online or paper often are designed to hide or dodge convenient  access to those mythical creatures called “representatives”.   As with  phone menus,  favorite techniques of human-avoiding bills include telling customers not to attach comments to payments, hiding contact information in small print on obscure back pages, or simply not supplying any phone numbers for customer assistance on the bills.  Thus, the double whammy for both remnant or aspirant Middlers is first, the time-devouring  irritant of problem resolution delayed and second, the tragic elimination of middle-class jobs.
 
*  ONLINE “DYSCONVENIENCES”:  Sure, if there is some activity you do repeatedly, the computerization of it can be convenient.  But consider also the huge and continuing increase in required use of the online mode for many activities with which you may not interact often enough to ever become familiar.  Such shifts in responsibility can be a great money saver for our towering tycoons, comfortably insulated from middle class stressors, but the bottom line is this: the middle class consumer today is expected to do a hefty amount of labor and take an ever-increasing responsibility for arrangements formerly done by workers in all sorts of  companies, notably larger businesses.  Big Biz is pawning off vast chunks of its labor costs back on the Middlers, whom they allegedly formed their companies to serve in the first place.  Some of  this shift in workload had been taken by relying on offshore workers, but perhaps now even that expenditure is resented.  Meanwhile the rich can hire people to respond to this new time-burden, Muddled Middlers without personal assistants or their own bureaucracy simply cannot do it.
       
*  EVER-CHANGING TIMES:  With fewer well-paying jobs, it will increasingly be people in the later stages of their lives and careers who earn comfortable, middle class incomes.   For such late-bloomers, instead of decades of  middleness, it may be only the last ten years of their working days that they get to be real Middlers.  If societal and technological change continues to accelerate, the reliance on humanless  systems may well become even more onerous for the surviving Middlers, even if they are aging Millennials or other generations who were suckled on cyber-tech, and the Conquering Cloud.
              
In such a future’s Bereaved New World -- of constantly accelerating  Mutatis Mutandis -- those lower and mid-Middlers who once ran the complex tech systems will eventually drop out or retire, usually with seriously strained financial resources.  As new wrinkles enter the current tech systems, these once-in-the-know folks, as their knowledge over-ripens, may discover newer more vexing stresses – far worse than wading through a tortuously useless phone menu.   These hapless aging Middlers to come will learn the future version of our present anguish – precious time lost while desperately hoping to speak to a real person whose annunciatory recording claims that “your call is very important to us.”  (Yeah right.)  All this from a company who finds us mere plebian Middlers apparently not important enough to hire enough (or pay well enough) to attract more expert question-fielders to answer our sincere calls politely and expeditiously.
 
 
*   WAITING IN TRAFFIC:  This maddening time waster often has been explored, since it is such a glaring example of the lifestyle limitations and  costs of being lower middle class.  Having toll roads or pay-for-use highway lanes may exclude the middle class or at least painfully pinch their budgets, but is merely one more trivial expense which the rich will readily absorb.   
      
Lower middle classers, whose incomes have basically have been flattened for decades must add to their formidable pile of bills if they want to save some of the time of commuting with the help of these special lanes or roads.   One of the benefits of mass transit, another alternative to sitting in traffic, is that it may allow time for reading, contemplation, or relaxation during the bus or train trip.   However, most representatives of the rich do not want to pay for this “free” time for some Middlers or aspiring Middlers.
 
And when the Holy Grail of traffic control finally arrives (if Elon Musk is right) within the next decade or so – the driverless robo car – of course only the rich will be able to afford it.  Because in the Techno-Econo Animal Farm of post-modern America, “All drivers are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
 
*       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
 
Back in the late 1960s, the British Invasion rock group, the Kinks, sang what could have been a prophetic dirge for today’s lower and mid-middle classes about being “…so tired, tired of waiting…”.   There weren’t even phone menus back then and a lot fewer “pay way” lanes, but the Kinks’ sentiments nevertheless resonate through the middles waiting for help on the phone, for rises in real wages, for egalitarian transportation (maybe another day we can lament the airlines’ relentless attacks onlower and middle class flyers),for affordable education, or for human-backed billing systems.
 
If we wait and wait (and wait) long enough, will Godot or somebody like him, or at least middling respect, ever arrive?
 
Don’t hold your breath America.  You might end up turning blue, minus the red and white stripes -- across your back.


© Copyright Dr. Geoffrey B. Garwick.  All Rights Reserved.

                                            ______________________________________

Editor's note:  Our indelibly progressive amigo de letras, Geoff Garwick, will continue raging against The Machine in a future post, coming soon to a website near you.  Stay tuned.  Or at least reasonably open-minded.  But never  look backwards.  Sump'm might be gainin' on you.
                                            ______________________________________
                        
(Special thanks to photographer Jim McIntosh of Philadelphia for his top photo of Bread Line Statues.
And warm thanks to Ryan McGuire, Ithaca NY for his evocative monochrome of Waiting Woman, below.
Another hearty 'n hale high five to the gifted team at Pixabay for their stellar cornucopia of art pics.)

© Copyright Geoffrey B. Garwick.  All Rights Reserved.
 
“Class warfare” and “income inequality” are now common terms among progressives, and even some conservatives, but it needs to be noted that only in the last two years or so have these terms been bandied about by national and state political candidates.  The more socially acceptable code for these perspectives is “protecting the middle class”, a phrase focuses on the victims of sweeping economic shifts since Reagan, as opposed to emphasis on the victors, via phrases such as  “the One Percent” or “the Billionaire Class”.   As a proud non-economist, I would like to remind us briefly of what I see as  eight signs largely based on of the financial disempowerment of the “middle”  -- which are only sketchily acknowledged by the so-called experts, and are evident even in relatively successful locales within the stable and (most-often) liberal state of Minnesota in which I live.
 
1-  YOU DON’T GET PAID FOR SAVING UNLESS YOU’RE ALREADY RICH.  
Admittedly, 5% is neither a breathtakingly rapid nor hefty return.  For many years after World War II, you could be a risk-taking speculator if you wanted, but even a child, a disinterested saver, or a forgetful accumulator could earn that noticeable, and sometimes significant five percent return on savings.  Nowadays, we middles are supposed to try to search for 4/10 versus 5/10 of a percent, and that’s only if we’re lucky.  Sure, you can get big bucks by trading in securities and junk bonds or even in the housing market, but multiple times in the last 25 years, we’ve seen all of these arenas go bust.  Don’t make me laugh at gold, but I’ll be happy to underpay you for yours.
 
2-  PAWING  at a PAWN’S  BELONGINGS.   
There are two separate etymologies behind  that curiously loaded word, “Pawn”.  When you are a “foot soldier” with little control over what happens around you (whether spelled “peon” or “pawn”,  which have the same derivation, Latin ped  for “foot”) you are low person on the trading board.  Period.  “Pawn” as in “pawn shop” is from Latin’s pignus  meaning “pledge” or “security for a loan”.  I always thought, perhaps due to being a speaker and researcher on sexology, that the three yellow balls or circles of antiques pawnshops looked like diagrams of reproductive human organs, perhaps reflecting what happens to many folks who have to pawn their stuff.  In any case, I see pawnshops multiplying and enlarging.  Look around, how many pawnshops does your community really need?  They supply some helpful services, but they are signs of economic despair and disability increasing.  Communities which rely on pawning are displaying an increasing number of economic pawns.
 
3-  USURY, PAYDAY LOANS and OTHER FEES.  
I recently read in the popular press that in Minnesota, at least one big pawnshop owner is also a proprietor and ardent advocate for barely regulated payday loans.  When former middles find themselves ensconced in such services, their pawn status is clarified, and certified abysmally.   The usurious rates many credit cards are able to charge in our deregulated times are extraordinary historically and not much different from those exorbitant payday loans.  Middlings who are paying only interest or minimums on their credit cards are teetering on the brink of leaving the Middle and dropping into the abject Poor, while clearly serving as pawns to big organizations.  In a similar pawn-spawning category are the tricky and frequently bulky fees that the cards (Big Plastic), the banks, many stores, and even utilities throw about.  The banks are wriggling around in their usury-dispensation wallows, striving to reformat some of the lending practices recently outlawed.  But they are not interested in using this same ingenuity to start raising the interest they pay – which is eminently fair and just -- as the Federal Reserve increases their own bank rates.
 
4-  DOLLAR STORES and RUMMAGE STORES.  
Like pawnshops, they provide a service, but what was wrong with charitable groups such as Salvation Army or  Goodwill running these stores?  Dollar stores are basically glorified rummage shops; and they are beloved by many, but how many of them do we truly need in an economically healthy community?   Do they support a strong middle class or merely confer some scant supplies and solace to the “De-middling” Legions?  Perhaps, but they in conjunction with the other symptoms listed here are ominous when in numbers like we see today.
 
5-  DISCOUNT MALLS. 
I’m not sure how many any metropolitan area needs, but such malls are generally celebrations of brands and big name franchises, not local businesses which may have middle class owners and connections in the community.  My impression is that these malls are another place for Middles to desperately seek lower cost goods, but it’s not clear that the costs are substantially lower or the selection better.
 
6­­-  COLLEGE CUT-THROAT LOANS. 
This fundamental attack on middles and their values has been well-publicized, with special places in hell for all those conservatives who have pulled the rope ladders up after themselves if they used public colleges or GI loans to get their own tidy little degrees.  Again, those at the higher reaches of the middles may be able to repay loans or otherwise finance college, but it is those at the lower reaches of middling whose children are excluded or whose families are too impoverished to enter wholly into the great American Dream of equal opportunity – in education, then jobs.
 
7-  BLACK THURSDAY / FRIDAY  and  WORKING HOLIDAYS.  
They didn’t work so well this year, I’ve heard from insider pros in the retail game, but I assume such strategies will continue.  Shoppers who must rise at unusual hours, go store-visiting instead of hanging around with family on Thanksgiving, or who endure desperately crowded struggles for bargains, may just enjoy the hunt, but in many cases these forays are forced forays for items they could otherwise not afford.  Those who must battle for bargains and those who must work on holidays are displaying another form of pawnism.       
 
8-  RESPECT for the MIDDLE CLASS by the YOUNG. 
As much as I insist on the absolute necessity of having a prosperous and burgeoning middle class, it is a sign of troubling, even pathological economic debility when our own youngsters must campaign for the future of their own middle class, which by all that is right and decent, they should eventually inherit anyway.  It is far more hopeful for our society when the young and restless feel comfortable enough about the future to critique the bourgeoisie and lambaste their parents’ materialism, rather than live in fear of losing their … birthright Middleness.
 
                                                                         -- G.B. Garwick, Ma.RS, Ph.D, L.P., FAAIDD