The Love Thong of Barney Frank’s Tax Payer

(T.S. Eliot, keep your eyes closed)

WHY them pay them, you and I,
With nude wallets spread out against the sky
Likely patients etherised upon their table;
Where laws pass, with totally unready pages,
The unuttered deceit

Of restless nights in one-night hospitals
And rusty surgeons tools with rancid smells:
Cures that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To bleed you with overwhelm’d obsession
Do not ask, “Who pays for it?”
Let them try to make us visit.

In the chamber Baboons come and go
Molesting your children for their dough.

Their yellow courage rubs its back upon your taxed remains,
Their yellow belly rubs its odor on your taxed remains
Sticks its tongue from their orifice of bamboozling,
Licks your savings flowing down golden drains,
Best not forget their quick cheap words squirting from lobbies,
Forced last minute injections to keep,
And seeing that it was a soft Friday night,
Crammed it down the House, and sheared the sheep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow slime that slides along K-street,
Scratching its back upon your broke remains;
There will be time, there will be time
For balance by fate, to meet the faces whom they cheat;
There will be time to confess and prostrate,
And jail time for the works and days of hands
That lift and scoop dollars from your plate;
Time for them and time for free,
And time yet for a hundred incisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before more making of bad laws with glee.

In the chamber Baboons come and go
Molesting your children for their dough.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do we dare?” and, “Do we dare?”
Time to turn back from deadly health care,
With a bald lie in the middle of their claims-
[They will say: “How we eat our lunch for free!”]
Their childish gloat, their hubris strapped firmly to the chin,
Their self-lie rich immodest, but asserted by a simple sin—
[They will say: “Just tax the rich and we’ll be free!”]
Do we dare
Insure the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions each more costly to reverse.

For we have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the taxing, spending, liar’s tunes,
Why have our lives measured out by dumb Baboons?
We know the voices crying with a dying fall
Beneath the scalpels from a farther room.
So how should they presume?

And we have known the lies already, known them all-
The lies that kill in a drug formulated daze,
And when you are well drugged, sprawled on their needle,
When you are pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Who will cure their evil
That grinds up all the time of your children’s healthy days?
And how should they presume?

(hopefully, not to be continued …)