Variations on a Punishing Theme

When people are hungry and at risk of homelessness
despair
wilting and climatic yet chronic extinction,
It is because their administrators and developers,
incubators and technical assistance providers
grantors and lenders
representatives and public sector officials
absorb too many investments and nutrients
for their own mouths and mortgages,
sleeping soundly at night
unaware of how their CQI intentions
economically and ecologically miss their orthopraxis mark
of solidarity and mutual subsidiarity,
of redeeming the bedtime and nutrients
they intended to invest in those with greater need.

Therefore the self-oppressive unruliness of hungry homeless people
Is due to over absorbent interference of well-intended practitioners
expert administrators
senior consultants.
That is why dominated marginal monoculturalists of poverty
are so dissonantly unruly.

Chronically at-risk people are not afraid of death’s dissonance
and entropic trends,
Because they are anxious to survive,
to build life; not so much death and perpetual advent.
That is why wilting lives are not afraid of macrosystemic death trends.
It is mutual-mentors who invest in cooperative living
That incarnate wise evolution of deep ecologically balancing lives.

Self-composting toilets
have surprisingly greater value
to people without a pot to pee in
than self-composting banks.

Transposition of Laotse’s “On Punishment-4”, p. 302, Modern Library, 1942, Lin Yutang translator and editor.