steamy

perfect popovers
bitten fresh from the oven
exhale in my face

glorious afterlife

Killed on Ashura 
 Mousavi's nephew rose up 
to martyr status

Asian peril

Menacing boaters 
 carp erupt from the river 
 like self-hurling bricks

smug

in Voltaire's Candide
Leibniz was caricatured
too smug to observe

bad karma

Impious regime 
fires on crowds on Ashura 
now that's revolting

life is for learning

always the teacher 
she seeks to be in control 
rather than to learn

erased from history's pages

surpassing Yazid
spilling blood in a bad cause
 Ahmadinejad

structural problem

 Patrick T. Dowling 
 said "the more tubes you put in 
the more you get paid"

heal thyself

  

This planet's diseased 
 feverish and fading fast 
 maybe we're the plague

values

NSF's budget
would be a rounding error
for the Pentagon

now feel this!

Massive sub-woofers 
 clue the whole audience in 
 at the film's climax

reformation

 What rumbles towards us 
 in post-islamic Iran? 
 a Thirty-Years War?

order and magnitude

  

Mexico's police 
run on a rounding error 
 for the drug cartels

quest on, dude!

Forget the dragons 
 across the puberty bridge 
 sex becomes the quest

the people are rising

Mousavi's nephew 
was martyred on Ashura 
 Yazid won't last long

layered reality II

Sometimes, one sees clouds. 

 but like Monet's lily pond

 the blue sky's still there

layered reality

Sometimes, one sees clouds. 
 but the wise soul understands 
 the blue sky's still there

Persian passions

surpassing Yazid 
spilling blood in a bad cause 
Ahmadinejad

Teheran heats up

 Persian dualists 
 call their oppressor 'Yazid' 
 no room for parley

recursion

The very idea 
 that language is a virus 
 is a virus too

listening

Rivers of data 
 threaten to capsize the mind 
 no filters, no wit

Holmes' intellect

if you're Guy Ritchie 
 choreographing a fight 
 is rocket science

haunting

plinking in the night 
raccoons found the toddler's toy 
left out on the deck

bonded

the mingling of breath
more even than eye contact
horse intimacy

verdant

golden Xmas morn
oaks loom on glowing grass slopes
Maxfield Parrish light

finite resources

so smart and so dumb 
Robin Williams understood
president Clinton

Free Press ain't free

Why buy newspapers 
 what the state wants you to know 
is yours free at Tass

Tzimtzum

The Enlightenment 
 made room for democracy 
 by shrinking the Church

Assad

Bashir al-Assad 
thinks he has crushed Lebanon 
 has he not read Dune?

news from Nantes

  

Holiday in France 
be a hamster for a week 
"it's not abnormal"

talk to the man

Ashfaq Kayani 
 lets Zardari sing and dance
 while he pulls the strings

lean cat

muscles bunch and flow
 an anatomist's model
 stalks the impala

juggernaut

Mourn Montazeri! 
 the revolution still rolls 
with no one driving

broken eco system

something is missing
 acorns pile up underfoot
who ate my turkeys?

Iran's clock

Jefferson foresaw
  another revolution 
each generation

free Iran

Thirty years later 
 who's still nurturing the flame? 
Montazeri's dead

byzantine

Saeed Hariri 
 hugs the baron Harkonnen 
 while plotting revenge

permanent occupation

Obama's promise 
 to pulls troops out of Iraq 
 ignored contractors

cultivating lies

The Korean war 
 taught us what torture is for 
bogus confessions

whore

His hypocrisy 
would make Joe Lieberman blush 
if he were a mensch

misunderestimated

Intellectuals 
dismissed Palin as just wrong 
 but she's stupid, too

sampling rate

Fossilization 

 records only sparse data

from life's rich parade

sparse data

Fossilization 
 edits the data we get 
 episodically

special child

Sometimes George was right 
 studying his report card 
 he thought he's special

of form and of substance

All Pakistan knows 
 real power is Kayani's 
 he has the army

bigger than Jesus

  

After playing God 
 Freeman took a bigger role 
Nelson Mandela

something special for the holidays

for leopard seals
penguins are seasonal treats
a nice change from krill

shackelton's dilemna

blanketed in fat
penguins come ready-to-roast
what wine goes with that?

providential

all ready to roast
penguins come well-wrapped in fat
bacon's optional

avatar

Play at being god 
in a world you've created 
 direct a movie

poor dumb brute

Zardari's red cape
keeps our envoys distracted
from Kayani's sword

turf

Too many elbows 
crowd me away from the stove 
 now something's burning

ambidextrous

David sang laments 

"how are the mighty fallen"

 while seizing power

better than crying

Will Rogers averred 

 I just read the newspapers 

 the jokes aren't mine

source of creation

Only Earth herself 

 beyond any dwarf or elf 

 could unmake the Ring

special guy

Baruch Spinoza 

made enemies everywhere 

 easy as footprints

get real, Harry

Harry Reid feigns shock 
Lieberman won't vote with us!
He thinks we're stupid

naive

sullen high-school kids
act like they invented sex
did they come from mars?

new-found virtue

Danes and Norwegians 
 renounced war, but kept the gold 
 pillaged from convents

This bested my Jamis?

Neoptolemus 
took Andromache to bed 
 in his father's stead

orphaned

Where was Laertes? 
why should Nestor play grandsire 
 to Telemachus?

what a pit!

Darvaza crater 
 seems a fitting monument 
 to Turkmenbashi

treason?

Yoo and Addington 
 conspired to bring down the State 
 undermining Law

December dawn

bleary solar orb
 still gummy with last night's mists
barely sees the day

where there is no man

Poor Telemachus
 trapped while Nestor rambles on 
 where was Laertes?

the arc of history

Learn humility! 
 terrestrial vertebrates 
 may be just a fad

a posse of one

Ithaca's orphan 
 Telemachus had no friends 
better than his dogs

evil

Vote Cheney-Chthulu ! 
 if you walk on the dark side 
don't settle for less

anarchists

Yoo and Addington 
conspired to bring down the State 
 undermining Law

more a selling point than a buying point

Twelve meters of snow 
 piled downwind of the Great Lakes 
 crushes house prices

where the lighting is good

Panicked jack rabbits 
chase their shadows futilely 
 fleeing my headlights

resist!

a whole new cold war
mutant neuraminidase
gives flu a new edge

the fittest pathogen

in Vietnam's flu
mutant neuraminidase
starts the new arms-race

legacy

Float a bond today 
 let your kids pay the interest 
 family values!

stepping out

gussied up in snow 
mt. Diablo's stepping out
full winter plumage

Punch and Judy

we refuel Reapers
 Pakistan supports Lashgar
puppet fights puppet

interest group

Senator DeMint 
set the Right above what's right 
 to serve the people

pressure

The spaniards go wild 
 Raphael Nadal's left arm 
 could lift a whole team

marketing

Austrians are proud 
 billing Mozart as their own 
 not so much Hitler

intolerant

Where they don't exist 
 invisible minarets 
stoke Swiss phobias

crammed RAM

Excess of data 
 held in active memory 
courts paralysis

knowledge from data II

Explicit search keys 
 capped what you could find later 
in your data base

knowledge from data

Full searchable text 
 multiplied data's value 
 exponentially

unholy alliance

Libertarians 
 hold their noses when they vote
for the GOP

synchrotron radiation

shake an electron
like a tiny salt cellar 
a photon falls out

fine structure constant

in ten acts of speech
genesis sketched the cosmos
the rest runs on rules

rotten deal

propping up Karzai
 wins recruits for al Qaeda
 we can't afford it

Iraqi wages

backing the wrong man
 Chalabi, not Sistani
 we earn derision