[Newspoetry] Derivatives

[Donald L Emerick]

In Enron for Dummies Bill Keller said:

Financial derivatives --
contracts of contracts -- 
to buy and sell energy
introduced
the laws of supply and demand
to the energy market --
allowing anyone anywhere,
even remote speculators on line,
who may have no idea of reality
-- of what relationship must exist --
for the price of a thing,
like a piece of paper,
ought to be as to the underlying thing itself,
assuming that there must be something there,
lying beneath.

A dollar, for instance, is
a universal financial derivative,
for it states on its face,
"Anywhere something is for sell,"
in the argot of the supply side,
"you can demand to buy it,
for first or highest or posted bid price,
with enough of these dollars."

And the dollar says,
in the strongest laws of the marketplace,
sellers who refuse to accept these dollars
will be prosecuted to fullest extent of the law.

You only have to look
at a consensual contract
to find the bayonets of the state
propping the contract up,
as an enforceable agreement
between consenting parties.

A says to B:
"Sell me your birthright."
B says to A:
"Give me the price I ask"
It happened to be
non-monetarized,
a Kantian ding und sich,
a jewish (not irish) stew,
a mess,
as relates to any birth,
shall we say,
of a poetic pottage.

A birthright relates
to its origins as source,
via the laws of conservation,
to its value at maturity,
as primogeniture's claim,
upon all of the left-overs,
the scraps of a life,
the remains of what remains
when someone else dies
before the birthright holder does.

A birthright is as inalienable
as the laws of death and life.

The greatest heresy
of the modern world
lies in estates, trusts, and wills.
A dead man has no will,
but we invent the fiction
that he or she now wills this
post-mortem bene dictum.
We allow the dead
to rise from their graves
and to rob the homes,
the cradles of the living.
We deny the right of the living
to buy and sell birthrights
by denying that the living
have any birthrights at all.

We say man's estate is his,
to do with as he wills,
and we also presume,
in another fiction,
for mamas and papas lie
as fathers and mothers of lies,
that, absent contrary instructions,
a man's will is to bestow
the entire bulk of his estate
upon the most natural objects
for his affections --
his own children.

The children would have
no birthright to enforce
against another's will
that was arbitrary,
whimsy or caprice,
indulging wanton cruelty,
even against Nature herself. 

A will, then, defies
all of Nature's laws
of up and down and Gravity.
A will is an unnatural act,
a crime against nature,
for by its provisions,
man may try to deny truth,
by extending his own moments,
beyond the laws of life and death.

This is the ultimate lying deceit
of the force of the state:
we will enforce dying wills
against everyone who is living.

A will, then, stands against reason
as the lack of reason behind force.
A will stands for something.
A will represents,
by its dung and such offal things,
the ordered violence of the state,
against the disordered violence
that Nature seeks to practice.

Nature grants this birthright
solely to the living,
who come in generations,
one after the other,
as the survival of the species.
Nature says
the dead have no power
to regulate life --
the dead have only
this duty to the living,
this complete trust,
that they must fulfill,
that they must die.
The birthrights of the living
should rule over Death Rites
of the dying and their dead.

A derivative, you see,
also denies reality.
It pretends, in fictional terms,
that there is no underlying thing,
no thing that will die and be buried,
by pretending that what lies beneath
will always be around and living,
a thing that is infinite in existence,
a thing that is a God
is a God that is a thing,
an idol of the mind.

There is a sense, then,
that the laws against idolatry
were aimed at such falsity --
against fraudulent and misleading
ways of living and being,
ways of representing derivatives,
ways that evil triumphs over good.

The law of death's demand
Supplies life with its command:
Do this that ye may live
For awhile and yet again,
but violate the living loving
and so that same day,
which is always every day,
the one that comes but once,
and you shall die, eternally.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/newspoetry/attachments/20020130/5757e775/attachment.html