--Plea for a Future America Free of the Vice, Addiction, Impoverishment, Legislative Collusion, and Parasitical Industry of Gambling
by Eben
You need not dive in Puget Sound to find a monster miles round.
The largest of a slinking kind, nothing holds it or can bind.
It’s the Magic Lottopus, the same that puts the SQUEEZE on us.
Surely, something’s run amuck when souls are sold to Lady Luck.
A five spot here, a twenty there, it soon adds up: a life stripped bare.
Tentacles run up your pants, steal your dough and then fling grants
to every scam that bends the ear like those daughters of old King Lear.
He set them up and then found out
they left him nothing but his gout!*
Leaches that can trick and bait,
they say “Get in, bubba, don’t be late!
We’ll double on the second buck,
it’s time to cash in on your luck!”
And so you risk wheels and rent,
and lose it all (plus what friends lent!)
You’re walking now, no car, no home,
free to freeze, and free to roam.
Cage some smokes with your sign,
“Hey, man, can you spare a dime?”
When you’ve got enough to pay,
you try your luck again that day!
Meanwhile, thieves enjoy a yacht,
a custom craft your savings bought.
They don’t care if you now starve;
prime rib, sir, is what they carve.
Cleverly, they run an ad
to sucker in your Mom and Dad;
it won’t be long till they’re broke too,
and on the street to join you.
Olympia solons know no shame,
to rob the poor is just a game.
They ignore God’s “THOU SHALT NOT STEAL”,
and bring woe on the commonweal.
Battening on financial need,
the Lottopus kills us with pure greed.
Her strangle-hold we cannot break
while elected wolves are on the take.
“Easy money”, mountain-high,
hardens hearts and blinds the eye.
Such refuse to hear the cries
of hungry children, or the sighs of aged poor on fixed incomes,
who take a hit so hard it numbs.
They fill the street with hopelessness,
a crowd busted by Lottopus.
Eight million are your odds to beat,
like gravity you can’t defeat.
Climb Mt. Rainier with one big jump
before you ever see a trump!
Day by day the ante climbs,
the ads fly thick, with catchy rhymes.
The Lottopus, she sucks and swells,
feeding on our private hells.
What’s that awful smell round here?
Like milk gone bad or slugs in beer!
Lottopus, I think, it’s you,
bursting with a gruesome goo!
Some call it “Public Money” now,
to do us good, as they avow,
but actually it’s ROTTENOUS,
a spreading, civic cess.
The point? Citizens, stop and think before you throw money away. Why gorge Lottopus while you live on refried beans in sheet-rock Hoovervilles? Do God--unlike drugs, booze, the soaps, He’s your Friend, He’s True Help. And attend church or synagogue. The biggest hypocrites think they don’t need to go--right?
Psalm 119: 133-136: “Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not Thy law [Thou shalt not steal]”
*a comparable result of foolish investment, from Shakespeare’s account of a dad taken to the cleaners by two daughters, King Lear
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