Health care for all sounds so automatically correct

August 13, 1994  (I was 49)

Health care for all sounds so automatically correct

it couldn’t possibly be profitable except in some abstract sense

or to those who will steal from any plan we have.

And it tends to democratize accessibility to expensive care.

Global classism is not confined to religion race or place of origin,

it’s who gets the human organs and who gets the orangutan’s;

and of course who we get them from.

There always has to be someone to get them from.

It’s hard to realize the haves like the have nots,

there is so much evidence to the contrary.

Every little lobby group seems to need support.

The individual is just a collection of groups it supports,

just like God on a smaller scale

with not quite God-sized weapons firing at semi-automatic clip.

We allow the magnanimous gesture of the ape.

The heart of an orangutan

gets transplanted into some hyperactive chimp

who then eagerly displays problem-solving orientation,

trying in this way and that to elicit our attention.

The self-contained visionary orang goes unnoticed as he dreams.

The poet of the apes is irreverently disinterested

in our antic striving.  Mentally poised

his comic pride is such

that his laughter is repressed,

the humor of the swampy woods of Sumatra.

His demeanor remains subtly impudent

even as we give his heart away.