For 2008

The neighbors were traipsing around like drunken daisy peddlers at a peace rally.
$1 for the daisy, $3 for the “special” daisy with the joint tucked inside the faux stem.
Like how they do on the side of the highway in Houston with the roses.
Only these people weren’t peddling daisies and they hated marijuana.
What they were really doing was trying to get a peek at the man who himself had been traipsing around the neighborhood the night before,
quite unlike a daisy,
more like a wild hog,
in a dress, and heels, with women’s underpants on his head and some silvery cop sunglasses.
It was New Years Eve and the world didn’t explode and the ball had been dropped and the hammer never came down.
The numbers changed, but the mindset didn’t. The days were still short and the nights were still cold and the war raged on around the world for all to see.
Leaders were assassinated in countries where they actually did such things and the peasant minions were sprayed with hoses and bullets and tear gas as they hurtled rocks at police hell bent on keeping the status quo,
no matter that the status quo had been shattered eons ago before the concepts of AD and BC were ever, even, thunk.

For there’s no such thing as time, and there’s no such thing as place, there’s only here and now, wherever it is we may be sitting.
For me it’s Houston, tomorrow it’s Austin, and in a few years it may be Auckland, but will probably be Austin,
for all a man wants is a chance to comfortably co-exist with the peasants, the servants, the leaders, the writers, the musicians, the sculptors, the artists, the babies and the women who bore them.

The food will remain on the table with or without the water to wash it down, and the children will quit screaming as soon as their most basic needs are satiated.
Meanwhile, millions of its brothers and sisters will starve,
sleep in the sand,
drink imaginary drops from dry wells,
never knowing the power of the pen, as they may or may not have ever even seen a pen. For many get by on much less, and right or wrong, whatever it is that you might have in your pockets,
will never be a match for what one might have in his or her mind.

As master of your own destiny, you should already know this.