OPM Disability Retirements: The verse of 1-liners

Can a verse stand alone, isolated in its metrical composition, without preceding or succeeding contextual delineations? Of what value can the singular have, without the surrounding aggregation of the whole? Like a scrap or fragment of a larger narrative revelation, of archaeologists and anthropologists working with but a piece of the greater story, the verse of 1-liners forever echoes for a harkening of others to join. John Donne poetically captured the sense of that isolation, and Thomas Merton wrote a reflective narrative upon that very theme […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Rhymeless Poems

When did it happen? Certainly, by the time E.E. Cummings came upon the scene, with his oddity of typographical stream of consciousness, the acceptance of it had already come to fruition; or, perhaps it was in the translation of foreign such vehicles of linguistic amalgamations – when the first frustrated translator threw up his hands in disgust at a Japanese Haiku or a German verse of too numerous a compendium of throat-clearing consonants, that the advent of the rhymeless poem reached its fulfillment and pinnacle of public acceptance. Or, maybe we just ran out of words. […] Read More …

Reflections on Federal Disability Retirement this Independence Weekend

Each country has a symbolic date for celebrating independence; that historic marker which represents the freeing of a populace from the chains of tyranny. Some may view it as an anachronism, and in such a mindset, it is merely another day off from the daily . […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Escaping the Feudal Paradigm

Anachronisms rarely die a sudden death; instead, they fade over time, with vestiges and residual skeletons of facades and structures remaining stubbornly in place for decades, and sometimes centuries. The system of vassals paying homage and fealty to those who […] Read More …

Federal and Postal Disability Retirement: Suburban Sketches

Within the past 2 weeks: a rabbit’s nest is discovered in the back yard; then, in the early morning dawn of the next morning, that same discovery is met with a predator whose presence is feared only in the limited universe of suburbia — the neighborhood cat. Laying with […] Read More …

Federal Employee Medical Retirement: Where Once, the Mirror Reflected

Communities are sensitive organisms; what constitutes one, how and when it is identified as such, and whether there exist any such entities, anymore, is of valid concern. Is a suburb comprised of mansions constructed in the middle of an outlying tract of land, formerly […] Read More …

Disability Retirement for Federal Government Employees: Asymmetrical Lives

Asymmetrical systems are an important principle which dominates organisms and prevails in the world around us. Symmetry involves balance and parallelism; a defiance through a counter-symmetrical eruption is normally an anomaly and deviation — a mutation in organic […] Read More …

Medical Retirement Benefits for US Government Employees: The Watchmaker

Artisans are scarce in existence, these days. With the constant drone for the economic push for profits, and the incessant pressures of everyday expenses, the village watchmaker, the goldsmith who personally fashions the engagement rings for the couple […] Read More …

Federal Worker Disability Retirement: The Paradoxical Soiling of Sacrament

Can a person enter a religious institution (i.e., a church, a mosque, a synagogue, etc.) without an intent to worship, but merely as an onlooker, and yet assume the role of a congregant without soiling the sacrament of its grounds? Tourists do that all the time, and perhaps […] Read More …