The Poet's Room

            Leave the Hurly-Burly behind. Leave the television, the noise, the hustle and bustle of crowds. The drug commercials that promise you'll dance in the street or sunbath in the Caribbean. If only you buy our drug. The f ace cream that promise miracles; every wrinkle turned back thirty to fifty years. All the cons that offer a product that will make you the absolute sexiest man or woman in the world. Instead take a walk on the wild side.          Enter the deep quiet of a forest where life and death exist as an ongoing continuum.  A communion where each grows into the other.  Amazing how life breeds death, and death feeds life. Observe trees standing while slowly dying.  Dead limbs lifeless and hard. Sprouting from the trunk the fruiting body of the Pheasant Back Mushroom or Oyster Mushroom fungi that live by eating dead wood.           Some find the bosom of God in Nature. A place to lay a weary head. A deep quiet settles into my soul as I walk slowly trying to see and he

                           May 3, 2023   Dear Mr. Hendricks, Thank you for writing to me about Government spending.   Here’s the bottom line:  My plan to reduce the deficit while investing in America and our people is working.  Since taking office, I cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion, created 12 million new jobs and a manufacturing boom, and kept my commitment to build an economy that rewards work not wealth—an economy that leaves nobody behind.   Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act that I signed into law last year, we began cutting out hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful spending on special interests—finally allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices.  This law will also lower the deficit by ensuring that corporations pay a 15 percent minimum in taxes and the IRS has more auditors to crack down on super-wealthy tax cheats.  But we have to do more to decrease the deficit.  My Budget will continue to cut out wasteful spending on special interests, will protect and strengt