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Tumbang Preso (meaning, knock down the jail) is a game of arrests and escapes where each player's life
chances depends on the toppling of a tin can watched by a tag who plays guard.
Showing posts with label The American health care system and me. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The American health care system and me. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Jean Genet and me











The American health care system, Time or Asiaweek says, is tops at the higher end. I would end up a bag lady if I were there.

My poet friends there went into carpentry, care giving, backhoeing, then one, the best of the lot, to business writing for a computer company, and then real estate. Real estate doesn’t make her a real estate broker, only rich; she is a poet and will always be.

Jean Genet was a thief and his distinguished compatriots who think highly of their radicalism call him poet-thief, sometimes, criminal-poet. I asked, why not a broker- poet? If you want to distinguish yourself as a poet-fuck, sheilfa, said she, that’s your business.

I sometimes wish I were just plain me. Then maybe, just maybe, she can love me?

But maybe Jean Genet was just a mediocre thief, and like me he only stole books and bric-a-brac to get free board at the penitentiary. A place to be warm in, with table and chair, warm bodies, too, that he may write the plays he wrote.

And that’s why he never completed a novel; prison term didn’t allow him that breadth.