vestige of a beginning

fossil microwaves
left over from the Big Bang
hiss in the background

need a fix

hungry Egyptians
addicted to subsidies
crave a new regime

notorious

Quisling volunteered
thousands of young Norwegians
for the Nazis' wars

leading from behind

old men declare wars
from upholstered offices
young men fight and die

interesting times

now it's a footrace
in both Egypt and Iran
revolution brews

rumblings

The youth of Egypt 
 aren't drinking the KoolAid 
it's a police-state

an Idea whose time has come II

The youth of Egypt 
 won't wait forever for change 
 their eyes are open

entrenched

"Party of Lincoln" 
 morphed to "Party of Hoover"
 screw the little guy

an Idea whose time has come

Arab dictators 
 pray Tunisia's aberrant 
 history will judge

trade-offs

Endangered chickens 
 in some alternate cosmos 
 kept their liberty

point it! II

Point at the base lodge 
 stay off your edges and scream 
 turns just slow you down

point it!

Unweight your hind foot 
 let your snowboard weathervane 
 it knows the way down

suffer the little children

Tots learning to ski 
 strike the iconic posture 
 Christ of the Andes

displacement activity

English gardeners 
 vie for the longest parsnip 
 to prove their manhood

game theory

Strategy for 'Go' 
 co-opting our own canids 
 to guard sheep from wolves

nucleation

One tendril of ice 
 can organize the whole lake 
 on a Winter's night

classy

Personal honor 
 means more when you've nothing else 
 the rich can grow lax

and there arose a new Pharaoh...

Egypt's armed forces 
 aren't repressing protests 
 change is on the wind

suckers

Wall Street's lobbyists 
 write the bills Congress votes on 
 we're irrelevant

general tonic

IGF-b

potentiates memory

and growth of cancers

formless

Poetry unbound 
 from formal meter and rhyme 
 dissolves into mush

archaeoastrology

These photons are old 
 the stars have long since moved on 
 living in the past

paralysis

Too well-schooled to act 
 A prince of infinite space 
 melancholy Dane

around, alone

Joshua Slocum 
 wasn't cut out to retire 
 adventure beckoned

prolix

shoveling on more words
 she uses up all the air
 without saying much

Silvio

Richer than Croesus 
 randier than Bill Clinton 
 That's Berlusconi!

iron-clade

Sea lion, or bear? 
 the skulls are about the same 
 flesh them out like dolls

lean

Mexican cattle 
 don't get fattened on cheap corn 
 jerky on the hoof

guard my lips

think twice but speak once
leaping past your fence of teeth
words can't be recalled

unsettling

Sudan's precedent 
 heralds in a brave new world 
 new maps, month by month

Anathem

Stephenson's novels 
 masquerade as adventures 
to expound ideas

uncontested

The Kim dynasty 
holds all the reins of power 
 but the horse is dead

inflated confidence

Bullish consumers 
 expect to pay their debts back 
in debased Dollars

Hartford's man

No Public Option 
 can win 'til Lieberman's gone 
 we're counting the days

for a change

Our first MBA 
 occupying the White House 
 made lawyers look good

amok

Reagan's arms shipments 
 built Pakistan's ISI 
 Frankenstein's reprise

non-enforcement

when Bush left office
a moribund SEC 
woke, as from a dream

tick...tock...

Hizbullah pulls out 
 Lebanon's government falls 
 here we go again. . .

thin film

there's nothing deep here
 Michael Bay is in control 
 everything blows up

pride cometh before the fall

Malibu's mudslides 
 don't respect celebrity 
 lay the mighty low

black hole

In Guantanamo 
 political prisoners 
 are held off the books

forever

In Guantanamo 
 indefinite detentions 
 spit on human rights

kinship

One genetic code 
 shared by all kingdoms of life 
 marks us as cousins

cultural influence

Hollywood's values 
 would be known around the globe 
 if there were such things

contingent

Four limbs, five digits 
 why mess with a plan that works? 
 next world, something else

bad to the bone

As Martial might quip 
 who called Cheney vicious lied 
 he is Vice himself

dicey

Sudan's dilemma: 
 how to draw a new border 
 without open war

idiomatic

For August Rodin 
 faces don't show emotion 
 hands convey feeling

starting point

Not ex nihilo 
 chaos predates creation 
 in genesis one

glib

The Waksel brothers 
 could sell ice to Eskimos 
 or Martha Stewart

that's interesting

Fermi Learned nothing 
 from an expected result 
 progress needs the jolts

ma foi!

Faith in Apple stock 
 depends on Steve Jobs' liver 
c'est tous de la foie

short leash

Michael Mukasey 
 wants power to gag the Press 
 at his discretion

shroud

Winter inversion 
 Salt Lake City's iron lid 
 blots out the mountains

obsessed

A pact with Satan 
 explains Haiti's history 
 for Pat Robertson

it's all about Sarah

Governor Palin 
 claims she was Lauchner's victim 
 which one's paranoid?

reprise

Hizbullah pulls out 
 Lebanon's government falls 
 here we go again. . .

keynesian

a balanced budget
precludes deficit spending
Keynes showed us that trap

aleatory

a million monkeys
great art, tripe or gibberish...
they'll type it in time

novelty

check the internet
if it has utility
prior art exists

meaning

teleology
drives biologists to drink
what's senescence for?

shifting gears

vacation's over
comb the sand out of your hair
rig for re-entry

plutocracy

in democracy
it's votes, not dollars that count
we have something else

live news II

right before your eyes
bear witness to history
Sudan's war starts now

live news

Africa's next war
begins this week in Sudan
right before our eyes

branch points

"n" other cosmi
were exactly like our own
until I wrote this

friendship

walk with me a while
this garden of branching paths
could lead anywhere

George

compulsive liar!
his autobiography
lacks sincerity

crunch

rammed by Alaska
the North American Plate
crumpled like a rug

boundless

Isaiah 19
sketched a broader covenant
girdling the whole world

piercing

Up through the palate 
 penetrating the brainpan 
 good horseradish stings

down

Freefall seems daft sport 
 spreadeagled, belly to earth 
 forsaking the sky

the bad old days

Russian dissidents 
 sweat through Stalinist flashbacks 
 as Putin grows bold

melancholy

A Prince of Denmark 
 contemplating suicide 
 took the lot with him

altered

Waking from a dream 
 I'm clutching a bent haiku 
 logic's different there

track record

George Bush's dim son 
 bankrupted three companies 
 then the USA

perks

Lisa Murkowski 
 knows Alaska runs on pork 
 seniority pays

standards

Henry Kissinger 
 made Nixon look like a mensch 
 standing side by side

within U, without U

It's all about scale 
 a small step for the Euro 
 thrills Estonians

filters

Leave race out of it 
 behavioral profiling 
 means more than skin tone

barriers

Hydration burden 
 hinders passive diffusion 
 through phospholipids

louder

House Speaker Gingrich 
 brought toxic partisanship 
 to a fever pitch

Faith

Faith in inflation 
 takes the terror out of debt 
 if wages keep pace