The Poet in the basement
Down in my basement, the one with the door behind the book shelf, the one you have to take the narrow stairs down from the upper basement (what Sonjia calls the public basement), down in that deeper, secret basement I have a poet. I just call him the poet, much as we do not give a third trimester foetus a name, so this blob of protoplasm gets called the poet. I like to think of my secret, deeper basement as my part of the struggle to fight drug addiction. We have safe injection sites where illegal drugs are sold and consumed, so I have a safe kidnapping and torture site. I do not want to be a burden to the tax payer, so I just do not tell anyone about it, except for the members of my local chapter of worshipers of Set, the Snake God. I can trust them, which is important in a country without free speech.
It is not easy providing the services that you pay taxes for but do not receive. The incidence of kidnapping and torture in my community are way down. I am providing a vital social service, at my own expense. And the expense part is beginning to weigh down on my status within my community. To keep up my street credit, I need some stylish sneakers, a new coat stylish for a drag queen out of drag, and a baseball cap. This all costs money (either to buy from the store, or buy from the shoplifter), and without them my rage at the legacy of slavery grows without bounds. To work out my rage I kidnap and torture people, in the basement. I read in the progressive media that some whitey called an N-person the N-word in some American city over the last decade. That is justification enough. Which leads us to fourth trimester foetus, the poet, in cell number three, in my secret basement under the public basement of my house.
For a Canadian, he misses sunlight way too much. The poet has been asking to see the Sun. I gave him a copy of the paper by that name, but he wanted to see the one in the sky. It was cruel, I know, to willfully misunderstand what he meant, kinda like when they cut up a third trimester foetus in the womb and make out that the squirming is not from pain. But the poet is a fourth trimester foetus, and the same rules he lived by he can continue to live by. I have not figured out yet how progressives change their standards from person to person, day to day, or situation to situation. Unlike the laws of physics (gravity never lets you down!) which seem pretty consistent. If we could predict the changing nature of the unchanging social-moral laws of the progressives we could, well, not live in a bedbug infested city, infested with crime, infested with illiteracy, and infested with bastards. Maybe even not infested with progressive voters. I want to live where the progressives do, outside the city; either that, or have the progressive spawn live around the progressive spoor, much as the cockroach Canadian community does. Hopefully, the poet will give us the needed insight.
In Canada, they give out money for people to not do anything. That is to say, they do nothing, but they do nothing well. There is a committee of experts on nothing that identify and reward other people who do nothing. In Canada, we call this Arts spending. The poet in my basement, he got a thin, small book of poems (in large font) published this way. For five years he got 50k from the experts on nothing. I even have the book of poems he used to plagarize from. It took some effort for the fourth trimester foetus to change a word here, move a line there. Well, that is more than nothing. He did vote for the Arts spending party, and work for the Arts spending party, and he did sign letters and make seminar calls for the purposes of the Arts spending party. Which is something. And, he had a magnificent bag of dope in his house when the Vampire Discussion Group of the cult of Set, the Snake God abducted him from his tax payer provided house. We were just going to sell his blood to the Mitchieville Red Cross, use him as an extra in a Snuff film, sell his organs, and make him into Oktoberfest sausage * , when we discovered the magnificent talentless parasite we had in the back of the van on the ride back to the safe house in Old North London, Ontario. We all smiled, like a crocodile with an overturned canoe.
Getting back to sustainable funding, we decided to keep the poet around and writing. He can sign grant application forms, and letters to awards committees. And do it all in a low carbon lifestyle. The basement is unheated. His food comes second hand from the dumpster behind the food bank (where the social parasites sell their vegetarian handouts for sex, drugs, and rock and roll). All we need are twenty poems in the white guilt genre to please the milky white skins of the guardians of the public purse. In exchange for this, there is the satisfaction that his personal Global Warming will not happen until the festival of Moloch. Being new age, we offer fourth trimester offerings to the welcoming fires of that god. But all this waits for the poet to choke out his twenty lines of hate whitey, twenty lines times twenty for the book. He can hate Christianity, he can hate straights, he can hate normals, he can hate capital, he can hate corporations (but not in the way they keep teachers pensions afloat), he can hate tax payers, he can hate chainsaws; he can hate all he wants, so long as he gets the grant from the shibboleth of the talentless Arts industry. Sustainable funding for a progressive voice; aren’t I wonderful?
