In response to article: "What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?"

Originally published in "The Root" magazine:

by Steve Swimmer

Mr. POTUS and his V.P., smiling through the “drug war.”

Better to be aware of wide smiling Americans like “drug warrior” V.P. Biden. Who, as Sen. Joe Biden, was directly responsible for enacting Draconian drug laws, here, in our United States. He voted for extraordinarily harsh drug laws, lauded them for political gain and displays, at ever turn, his theatrically wide toothy smile about them.

Today, our Great Nation’s V. P. flashes that large plastic smile accentuating his political periods to convince you he is sincere. Of course, my fellow Americans and I recognize the old time Joe Biden as a complete phony who will “smile” on political cue.

And, to our great misfortune, our Great Nation’s President, Pres. Obama, is adopting the Biden “toothy grin” for much the same reasons.

Lately, with big toothy grin, the V.P., along with Pres. Obama, emphatically reinforced the Draco approach to drug control by boasting, in no uncertain terms: The United States will stay on the same favored course the “drug war” has always driven.

No matter, 40 years “drug war” of ruinous death and destruction. Or, for that matter, whatever peaceful solution many people here in America and across the World want. No, the intransigent; yet, all smiles, Obama / Biden will not consider, not even on a small scale, the “legalization” approach. Not those two; they just keep smiling, as the band plays on.

Thus, here is the inside line. Be warned and aware: wide smiling “drug warrior” Americans, almost always are telling you lies. When the U.S. Pres. and V.P. tell you, complete with big smiles, the “drug war” is just fine; believe me, it is time to tighten your helmet.

This is what Obama / Biden policy has in store for you. And, I can assure you it is no “smiling” matter.
As a “drug war” casualty, I know first hand all about United States government authoritarians, and their ability to kill, arrest and destroy without compunction.

Here are the facts of my personal encounter with the “drug war” Obama / Biden shoot first mentality. Judge for yourself: is this what you want for our Great Nation?

Fact one: My Son, Michael, is among the all too numerous "extra judicial" homicide deaths, here in the United States. He was gunned down by, quite literally now, hooded jack booted “drug” thugs with police badges. This is the ‘drug war” Pres. Obama and V.P. Biden whole heartedly support with their obnoxious on cue extra toothy grins.

While Michael stood naked by his own bed, the “drug” kill squad burst through his front door and riddled his bedroom with machine gun fire. Michael was shot 10 times and died a few hours later.
The “drug warrior” “shoot first ask no questions” authorities, lauded by a smiling Pres. Obama and V.P. Biden, all agreed killing my Son (who had no police record) was just, because an “unidentified informant” said: Michael had 368 tablets of ecstasy.

And, of course, the “drug” police “cover-up team” claimed there was the always just too convenient gun which was most certainly never fired; nor, for that matter, even produced. Here, in the United States, police notoriously “plant” guns on innocent victims they kill in order to cover-up their own murderous ways. Yet, President Obama and V.P. Biden keep on smiling.

By now all should know, regardless of our Leaders smiles: United States “drug” authoritarians, with little or no compunction, complete with impunity, shoot people to death often based on nothing more than “suspicion.” Is this what you want America? More "extra judicial" death? Well, go along with the all smiles Obama / Biden “drug war” and that is exactly what you will get.

I know, for an experienced unequivocal fact: Obama / Biden commanded “drug” authorities, at will, set up arrests, shoot people (along with their dogs), until dead; and, not one regular Citizen can do anything about it.

Fact two: I was arrested, and manufactured into a criminal in New Orleans for marijuana. United States’ “drug warriors” manipulated the entire matter and delivered the marijuana. I was to pay what I could, when I could and if I could. I had no where-with-all to accomplish the crime so the “drug warriors” provided all of that.

What I had was the "propensity" to do the crime; therefore, according to United States’ crafted law for political gain by the likes of the phony grinning Joe Biden; rather than obvious entrapment as in the rest of the World, all the United States’ “drug warriors” did was considered completely legal. I was forced to agree to a set prison sentence while, quite oddly, forced to tell the Judge I was not being coerced. In my case, there was no violence, no marijuana (other than the U.S. Government's), no guns, and no money.
　
Yet, at 50 years old, with no police record, I became a “manufactured criminal” in the “drug war. (side bar: a huge percentage of the prison population, here in the United States, is made of manufactured criminals, imprisoned by legal design to keep the Prison / Industrialist fat) while the taxpayers spent around a million dollars on my arrest, conviction and incarceration.

I mean, if you want the police state like the one Pres. Obama and V.P. Biden’s “drug war” has created here in our Great Nation, you ought to be prepared to pay for it. Considering the tax burden Americans unflinchingly pay for this high priced Obama / Biden “drug war,” small wonder the POTUS and his V.P. are all smiles: they are smiling all of the way to the bank.

Here, directly attributable to Obama / Biden drug politics, the U.S. imprisons 25% of the world's prisoners, more prisoners than anywhere else in the world, while United States population comprises 5% of the world's people. Per capita, The U.S. imprisons six times to twelve times the number of British, French, German, Canadian or the rest of the civilized world prisoners; and, the U.S. imprisons young Black males six times the number of their White counterparts.

Do you really think United States’ people are that bad?

Here is what we have to show for 40 years of “drug war”: 46 million of us have police records, with 2,500,000 Americans behind bars and 12 million plus more under post prison restrictions, it is small wonder there are so many jobs available for 12 million undocumented immigrants (who slip by with clean fingerprints and $40 worth of false identification) and no money left for much needed health care.

Despite our President and his V.P.’s toothy grins, trust me on this one: A huge number of U.S. prisoners should not be in prison. True, some people need to be incarcerated; unfortunately, due to smiling Pres. Obama and V.P. Biden’s leadership along with their “drug warriors,” U.S. prisons are full of non-violent prisoners serving outrageously long sentences.

Is this what my fellow Citizens want? More “manufactured criminals” filling more prisons? Follow the smiling ways of Pres. Obama and V.P. Biden; and, this is exactly what you will get.

Fact three: Absurdly extra wide smiling Pres. Obama and V.P. Biden along with their “drug warriors” will not tell you the truth about the “drug war.” They are in it to deep and have become the important part in generating money (and I mean, lots of money) for their authoritarian ilk and very importantly, the prison / industrial complex.

Pushing the “drug war” in the rest of the World enriches the same vested interest crowd all that much more. Meanwhile, this entire ugly crew is paying no mind to the death destruction and endless horror foist on regular people by the greedy quest for as many United States tax dollars as they can get.

True, the “drug warriors” force me to bow by implementing procedures like sanctioned murder of my Son, Federal imprisonment, character assassination and confiscation of property. Also true, today, I am completely cowed, jobless, afraid and powerless to resist. All smiles Pres. Obama and V.P. Biden commanding their gang of drug thugs have beaten me down as they have millions of other United States Citizens.

I know, for an experienced unequivocal fact: Overcast with theatrical grinning, Pres. Obama and V.P. Biden’s United States’ “drug warriors,” at will, can take or destroy any property they like, set up an arrest or shoot me, as they did my Son, Michael, and often do to other people (along with their dogs), until dead. And, not one regular United States’ Citizen will be able to do anything about it.

So, lastly, I ask the big question: In order to appease wide smiling Pres. Obama and V.P. Biden’s U.S. authorized “drug warrior” blood lust approach to “drug control”: Will all of American citizenry be forced to cower (complete with phony smiles), before Pres. Obama and V.P. Biden sanctioned gun toting, soon to be drone flying “drug warrior” kill squads as I must cower, here in this Great Nation?

Hey, if that is what you want: All you got to do is keep on smiling. I mean it sure works well for President Obama and his V.P.

a detrimental & detoxified december w/ Jason Neese (.1)

-The cocktail party and the group clot.-

Here they are!

he is a re-purposed southern baptist
a masturbated clot of asshole sitting squarely inside a self-confidence
put together by a flash pan.

she blows him every night as they renew their marriage. God is in her mouth.

over there a man masquerading as a robot
tours the room with his eyes trying to find his island.

circles form like teeth.



you enter the room like a blank statement, your face surprised like test results

everybody keeps looking
smiling,
looking,
smiling.

we all drink slowly, reclining on the couch, or holding walls up,
flamingo standing on one polished heel
pushing orange slices around with our tongues
as the inevitability of what this is, hit.
a waste
of fucking
time. but not real time. real time is reserved for those frozen in the open mouth scream
that doesn’t take place at this party.

the himmler of the group smiled
shooing away positive thoughts with his mustache

the receiver of the table pulled both cheeks apart as the tab is inserted.

the keeper quietly gets drunk, acting unaffected by the entire event.

the shifter shapes our game plan into a toilet bowl and shits

the helper, helps us fundamentally understand how we are going to fail through the sharp filter of august heat

the healer retires and leaves a note in the corner

he sets up a trust fund for our future,

the victim continues to end every three minutes with a sip of his drink.

we hurl around the universe in place and we smile.
whole countries of people die and we smile
the waiter forgets the twist of lime and we don’t smile.
we kill, we kill with disapproving looks tucked under our noses
and then we smile.

throughout the talk edgy comments are made
and then waved away and then re-justified with passive attacks
on the other’s knowledge of the topic,
which is then tossed up, volleyed back, debunked, reconstituted
and finally helped along its way to ruin sum other subset of the next generation.

everyone is pleased

that this will keep happening.

a million of these moments are happening right now.
a billion of these moments happened right then
a trillion of these moments will happen right soon
and we smiled.

I don’t know what I was then or am now, but the view
was wonderful.

And the clot of our group unraveled while we ordered more drinks.

walking through memory's places (Final Act) by: Jeremy Hight

I am now getting a glass of water. In my memory of 1976. The hall carpet is puke orange shag which is probably something from films that was deemed to fit. The walls are crooked and seem extremely high, this must be from being a boy of 6 ; the scale is off like the child’s drawings of purple sky, planes with wings at odd angles with the logic of faces in a fake Picasso portrait painting, of cars flat as crushed cardboard and cats and dogs seemingly made of wires and cute awkward smiling faces. This makes sense in an odd way. The bathroom as I pass is vivid and feels accurate. The kitchen as I turn a light on in this memory comes alive with earth tones and a sense of having left in the real world just minutes ago until I now reach for a glass and essentially violate the belly of a cloud. The cupboards have eroded away in these decades, the sad bastards not relevant enough, maybe not individuated, like those people in the background in iconic photos and crowds . A romantic notion is to imagine these people as somehow incidentally remembered, some passive sort of recall becoming extras in dreams at night. Who knows, probably not. The glass has little gold flowers on it as the water from some place holder of 35 years fills the glass.

walking through memory's places (Act 2) by: Jeremy Hight

A fierce santa ana wind is blowing so hard it is bowing in the window here in 1987 in my bedroom. The dry wind other years will send huge fires up and raging, some to burn to the ocean shore so far from here. My mother’s Multiple Sclerosis has sent her through the sad progression from walking to cane, to 3 prong cane , to walker, to wheelchair…soon it will be the humming electrical one she will ride around in until her body denies her even this. But in this memory and place she is asleep downstairs while the wind blows and will awaken to another day here in this world , this tissue paper thin world of many slivers of past and place. The stereo plays a Kraftwerk record, that one scratch soon to click and pop. The wall posters are Theda Bara and SST records. The bed by the wind has covers that change colors , I guess I can’t remember which ones to fit here so it flickers like some insane illuminated sign or a John woo film fight scene set to fabric. It is a melancholy room. The walls are a bit dirty and the closet is cluttered. The bright green of the artwork Cameron Jamie gave me when we were friends glows in recall amongst crushed books, magazines and old clothes still vivid now. The wind again bends the window, this time in the shape of a glass toenail. My brother’s room down the hall as I walk toward it moves from painted lines n the wall, rush records and a surfboard to the empty room and mattress on a floor, the dusty hall of spiders it became a decade later. The bathroom as I pass has bent wood for the floor, the shower is a glass so frosted in recall that it is near white. The sinks are aligned and waiting with a sad little floor dresser full of aging junk and beer cans. The window is a hole and the wind should blow through now as I move toward it but this synthetic place has no wind, only this illusion outside, outside the illusion inside that I still dream of, have nightmares of, hold onto for reasons I can never grasp. I walk down the stairs and front door is vivid and feels accurate while the hallway is half empty and half some stock image from a hundred horror films, the huge impossible banister pointing out to the windy night that forever exists and is long crushed into a past never to again be touched. This place I want to leave but in dreams I will always return.

walking through memory's places (Act 1) by: Jeremy Hight

It is 1992. There is an odd glow in the distance that changes colors in this memory. The air is cold even though it surely wasn’t , again some literal placemarker of the past in some electro-chemical confetti and the way it re-assembling (flawed) into memory, the way of old television sets of a time never to be seen again, of the color off and knobs for it, of horizontal , of vertical, of static and fuzz and fade.

This lawn is surely from a series of photographs that now sit in a bag behind old clothes in storage as much as this moment or all the years of these steps and spaces now forever undead with all the oblique great distances and closeness that memory entails. The cold seems more acute now and there a santa ana wind that was not there.
I did not know what was coming, those words from my father’s mouth in that water bed now forever a country and lone island at once. The television with the brown cable box above it will glow forever like
some ember more than integer in front of this long discarded bed.

The door and the hall lead past a living room now a carpet on nothing, another television I took soon after this world and place to San Francisco to later die in Grad School at Cal Arts painted, damaged, but with the grace of someone who has lived a long life and wears the years , a beauty we cannot possibly touch nor fully understand like my luminous souled grandmother we will both bury and celebrate in a few days from tonight. Her grace nearing 100 we cannot touch, only celebrate even as we mourn.

My father says now “It is on” as he did then. His words are clear even now as the back wall undulates and the window changes shape behind that tv in this forever and gone room at is forms and people and place . The L.A riots have begun. The distant glow was the city burning/ is the city burning. In south central unbeknownst to this space of memory my grandmother can see flames down the street. The images of unrest, of police brutality, of corruption and anger, they are a sort of oatmeal of motion on the tv now as I turn back in this past and walls vanish, , my mother turns and looks at me , her eyes now only of photographs and recall , my father soon will turn up the volume on that tv in this room now unfinished and vivid, breaking a bit in recall as time goes on. The bed undulates and the lamp light grows clear now in this place drawn from a million pieces , surely one of a thousand places like this to walk imperfectly as past. i will come here vividly and incompletely for the rest of my life in sleep.

A Conflicted Poem for My Knife

I want to whole-heartedly
give you
to someone else.

Hell, I don't even know
if it's you we're talking about
here.

I want you to become
a part of someone else.
I want you to twist up
their insides
when you break it off.

I want to always
look at you as something
better than sandpaper,
or hand-to-hand combat.

I want you
to always shimmer
when we go out
at night.

I want everyone to
know you're there.

I want no one to see
you loosen up
when we're under pressure.

I want you to stay
tight, together,
stable, unnerving.

I want to give you
to someone else,
so I can stop feeling so...
-i don't know-
compulsive about
this 1-way relationship we have.

I want you to be
your perfect self,
to hold you in place of a pen,
to hold you in a place
akin to the esophagus
of a putrid mammoth
before the bulk,
young & needy valentines
in corporeal envelopes.

I want to buy you a sheath,
to polish your skin
with japanese waterstone sets
& Shapton mineral oil.

I want to give you
to someone else,
so I can see the flash
of NO FEAR
reflecting from
the rodent's eyes.

I want to give you
to someone else,
so I can learn to finally
fear DEATH.

-photos & artwork via Meth Lab photo/art-correspondent:
Pantifesto's Porntastic Phunhouse-

"Not All Writers Write, But Some Do" by an Online Friend

"Not All Writers Write, But Some Do"

(for Clement and Rodney but not Cycic)

I.
A writer writes as often as a writer can, but he often neglects to do so because sometimes all there is to write about is the writerly struggle to figure out what exactly to write.

II.
When a writer neglects to write, he'll still consider himself a writer and arrogate to himself writerly qualities. Some of these qualities include (but are not restricted to) an inexplicable passion for bar fights and bus rides, as well as an obnoxious habit of yelling obscenities from a third story apartment window or hurling orange peels at a passing bag lady.

III.
A writer will promise to write sooner than later, then postpone all writing in order to masturbate. When he's done masturbating, he'll begin procrastinating. When he's done procrastinating, he'll begin to think about starting an outline, then put off writing it for a few months. Once he's ready to start thinking about writing his outline again, he'll push it to a later date and likely masturbate.

IV.
When a writer isn't writing, he's probably driving, or eating chips on the sofa. Either way, he isn't writing. He's sitting. But when he's writing, he's also sitting, which is why he often confuses writing with driving. When he reaches his destination after a long drive, he'll often fool himself into believing that he's actually gotten some writing done.

V.
When a writer isn't driving, he probably isn't writing. He may be thinking about writing, but he's easily distracted by the bag lady that passes by his apartment every day. He'll probably devise a plan to kill her, so that he can then write about it. But he'll quickly realize that another writer had written the same story and called it Crime and Punishment.

VI.
When a writer realizes that he simply can't bring himself to write, he'll do one of two things: emulate a prodigious, celebrated writer of the Western literary canon or jump from his third story window in despair, only to land on the bag lady who'll break his fall and be killed forthwith.

VII.
When a bag lady breaks the fall of a suicidal writer and dies forthwith, the writer will then be free to write about the experience without ever being suspected of ripping off Dostoyevsky. The experience is now authentically his, and all that's left for him to do is write about it.

VIII.
When it comes time for a writer to write about his authentic experience, he'll then struggle with form. He'll have trouble settling on a narrative technique and even switch back and forth between the first person point of view and third person omniscient, at which point he'll grow discouraged and give up writing---but only temporarily because he still views himself as a writer. Not just any writer, but the next Dostoyevsky.

IX.
When a writer considers himself the next Dostoyevsky and hasn't written more than three paragraphs of material, he's in for an unbearably tough time. This is the point that either makes or breaks a writer, and he is more defined by what he doesn't write than what he does write.

X.
When a writer is defined by what he doesn't write, he chooses to write only when he wants to, which is never. But he will perpetually think about writing and being perceived and lauded as a writer---a great writer in fact, who didn't have to lift a finger, or waste his breath, just pretend.