precocious

Arrogant primates 

 over-state our cleverness 

 slime-molds solve puzzles 

IgNobel

As a spermicide 

 tosay coca-cola works

would be distasteful

all is contingent

As you have planted 

so shall you reap the harvest 

 unless you have voles

the way of all flesh

Their young have all left 

 dwindling oldfolks wait to die 

 aspiring ghost-towns

neither fish nor fowl

More pigs than people 

on north carolina's books 

 but how many vote?

More of the same

 old men in the park 

 chat about their bowel function 

 and world politics 

sturm und drang

 Gray curtains of rain 

 hide the drama of the storm 

 from its earth-bound fans

incoming

Whirling from the west 

 storms approach like lawn-sprinklers 

 from a god's-eye view

pioneers

Stout Fava beansprouts 

 poke up through the winter mulch 

 reclaiming their land 

Coriolis

 Like great lawn sprinklers 

 storms whirl in the troposphere 

 from a god's-eye view

Thanksgiving redux

Proteins and lipids 

 in dozens of arrangements 

 fill our grateful maws

11/27/08

 Four wild tom turkeys 

 amble up from my driveway 

 to launch noisy flights 

He who controls the past

Like most autocrats 

 Putin thrives on secrecy 

 just like George Dubya

walk this way

The sun's last glimmer

lights only the tops of waves

gold-hued stepping stones

half wits

Seeing my headlights 

 the deer step out of the road 

 into my driveway

Kafka Fragments

Missing the city 

 unsuited to the suburbs 

 she rakes leaves in heels 

pie-in-the-sky

Don't economize!

we'll sequester CO2

in peridotites

11/22/08

devoured by darkness

 just the moon's last rind moulders

 on the sky's midden

Harvard/Yale 2008

 failed banks and war-crimes 

 all those newsy distractions 

pale beside The Game

11/22/08version-II

devoured by darkness 

just the moon's last rind remains

on the sky's midden

smothered

Winter inversion

 swathes the flatlands  in grey fluff

 even smoke can't rise

murk

No dusk, no sunset 

 just a deepening of gloom 

 ends a gray fall day

new team, new game

 Rethinking healthcare 

 Daschle gets to drive for now 

 hard times could help him

transcend

Theodor Geisel

Told us to push the edges

“On Beyond Zebra”

linear limits

beyond "A" to "Z"

the world offers so much more

ponder "omega"

Who rules the seas

Churchill summarized: 

"grog sodomy and the lash"

made the seas British

11/18/08

Winter inversion 

 darkens the Berkeley flatlands 

 the hills still know sun

Mission accomplished!

 crass and pugnacious 

Bush sought to remake the world 

 now it's more like him 

subtleties

As with the Talmud 

 those who get it will get it 

 life's revealed in code

intruders

fresh-churned garden soil

 marks new gopher intrusions

we are not alone

death becomes you

Chlorophyl breaks down 

 laying bare other pigments 

 in the Autumn leaves

what lies beneath

Stripped of chlorophyl 

 other pigments strut their stuff 

 like beach-going flirts

scandal

 Athletic tuna 

 canned as a commodity 

 fatten flabby kids

myopia

As sure as dodos 

 tuna face their extinction 

 for being tasty

commodities

Our school-lunch programs 

 fatten our kids like cattle 

 on subsidized corn 

imperious

As if he were king, 

Bush delegates war powers 

 in secret, of course 

amok

Rogue executive 

 trampling norms of war and peace 

 "W" plays god

back in the game

new indications 

 buy more years of patent life 

 for old statin drugs

silent menace

Suburban squirrels 

 can't adapt to the Prius 

 their blood smears the road

cyclic time

dawn lights the river

 brides bathe between charnel pyres

 in old Benares

together

Loyal to a fault 

 Dubya stood by his cronies 

 they failed as a team

spiteful mischief

Cheney's policies 

 were already satirized: 

"Saruman's demise"

Like a stray cat

 vacant retail space 

 banks foreclosing on houses 

Bush fixed the nation

inequity

His mother was white 

 but none assert that Barack's white 

 how is that equal?

Cheney chuckled

John Sidney McCain

sold his soul to the devil

for Bush's blessing

wormtongue

counselling caution

he lulls and delays the strong:

Dave Brooks as Grima

Final Mischief

After his ouster,

Saruman despoiled the Shire

like our lame duck, George

unbalanced

Fueled up on carbon 

 our atmosphere will cook us 

 if we don't wake up

Lieberman's legacy

 Hostage to Hartford 

 our system serves insurers 

 but not our health needs

stuck in the past

Voters from slave states

still vote against the black man 

 we seem not to learn

chastened?

reclaiming our seat

in the council of nations

 Obama steps up 

chillin'

Like teens on the beach 

 elephant seals congregate 

for courtship and sex 

after the campaign season

At the nursery 

 they have no manure in stock 

"huh?" I gasped "no shit?"

11/04/08

Oh my god it's phat!

puffy clouds pop like souffles 

 small rocks are soaring

hobbled rhetoric

 "safe legal and rare"

 expressed rare sense and nuance 

 in this sound-bite age

native environment

Do Oregon's teams 

 hold an unfair advantage 

 when the field is mud?

kin selection

Sacramental drugs 

 cement the community 

 of mycologists

solipsists

Drivers of grey cars 

 delay lighting their headlights 

 'til they've hit a bike

teased

Violent rain squalls 

 signal a bitching lapse rate 

 but preclude launching