Allegation nation.

[hester_prynne]

Allegation nation
cries to federal mum,
I got limitations here!
Fuck you, I ain't no bum!
Disc degeneration,
venous stasis too,
on top of all that
I'm suicidally blue.
Trying to get sober,
keeps me from work,
employers just can't handle
my schizophrenic quirks.
I had a neoplasm,
5 years ago,
Can't keep a job,
PTSD won't let it go.
Asthma, COPD,
pleural exacerbations,
pulmonary dis ease
atrial fibrillations,
bipolar disorder,
psychotic tend an sees,
left leg amputation,
upper GI bleeds.
But my dears,
you can still function,
stuff envelopes from a chair,
we can't give you your money,
if it indicates we care.

[mtmynd]

truly amazing what you've done here, Hes'...
a collage of all the crap you've been digesting
since you've walked into this latest job....

it's lyrical. it's honest. it's a song..!

sing it, my friend... with gusto and red wine...
from the bottom of your soles to the secret treasure of your soul...
sing it like i hear it... don't fear it... come near it and whisper... blues.

[K&D]

Would love to see this one preformed.

I like, and i think i've said this of your work before...I like how natural the flow seems to be...you manage to also be funny and kitch but not in a corny way....in a way that has a sense of style all your own.

like it, loved it....going to read it again!

[Yejun]

A rhythmic festival. It's a nice contrast, rhythm and theme.

[Arcadia]

I agree with cecil, K&D and yejun ... it looks and sounds great!

[Nazz]

authentic, rhythmic, brilliant. you captured it.

[stilltrucking]

Thank you for the poem Hester. You doing good work night and day just like Kafka.


Sorry about the digression, I truly loved the sound of your poem. Loved it and hated it too.

Keep up the good work.

Interesting article if you got the time, but it is long. I call it
Kafka I hardly knew ya
Here are some bits and pieces from it.

"Kafkaesque," in other words, is a phrase that has come to represent very much about modern life while signifying very little."

...Kafka's characters, who "struggle in a maze that sometimes seems to have been designed on purpose to thwart and defeat them. More often, the opposite appears to be true: there is no purpose; the maze simply exists." ... It is FEMA's process for granting housing assistance after Hurricane Katrina: victims were routinely informed of their applications' rejection by letters offering not actual explanations but "reason codes."

Apparently his day job also involved adjudication

Working in "the Manchester of the Empire," Kafka proved himself a legal innovator, developing and implementing safety measures and methods of oversight that saved the lives and livelihoods of countless workers. He appealed for the improvement of conditions in quarries, advocated for public assistance to disabled veterans and filed lawsuits against business owners who illegally withheld insurance premiums. And while he complained that the "real hell is there in the office" and, in his epistolary exchanges with friends and lovers, fretted constantly about the obstruction to writing posed by his day job, he also admitted the existence of "the deep-seated bureaucrat" inside him. In technical papers like "On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors" and "Measures for Preventing Accidents From Wood-Planing Machines," he surveyed the strange terrain his literary work would excavate.

Kundera writes, "Kafkology produces and sustains its own image of Kafka, to the point where the author whom readers know by the name Kafka is no longer Kafka but the Kafkologized Kafka." Readers should be up in arms, and perhaps the purest among them will storm the local university, where doctoral students are even now producing narrow interpretations of Kafka's work that fixate on middling details of his biography and blow them wildly out of proportion. For Kundera, such blasphemy has turned Kafka into "the patron saint of the neurotic, the depressive, the anorexic, the feeble; the patron saint of the twisted, the précieuses ridicules, and the hysterical."