improbable butterfly

caterpillars' dreams 

of soaring the Summer skies

don't convince skeptics

high expectations

Chocolate, not carob 

the taste of disappointment 

 makes lousy brownies

no reason

There's no reasoning 

 Hormone-addled teenagers 

 just gotta get some

fickle

Mitt Romney's pro-life 

except when he was pro-choice 

 He'll say anything

fertile ground

Their masters look scared 

 a billion Chinese peasants 

watched the Arab Spring

taking

Momentum's conserved 

 the policeman's radar gun 

 has to cost me fuel

retarded

A stream of haiku 

 bouncing off oncoming friends 

slows them down . . .a bit

unusual weather we're having, ain't it?

Snow accumulates 

 blotting out all trace of Spring 

Memorial Day

faith

Only the Coxswain 

 gets to see where we're going 

 the rest row on faith

rut

Years come and years go 

no evidence of learning 

mars our set routines

found art

Vivid orange newt 

 on a mat of verdant moss 

 jewels stroll the woodlands

spirit guides

Not too proud to learn 

macaques crowd Hokkaido's springs 

like Berkeley pilots

not done yet

Zeno's coffee cake

no one wants the last sliver 

but they'll each take half

right tool

Trees plucked like carrots 

 in the jaws of Dan's WeedWrench 

 life is so fleeting

REAMDE

Inside T'rain and out 

impromptu alliances 

 organize a war

epilogue

Our republic needs 

"The rule of Law, not of men" 

 Dick Cheney just smirks

junk II

George R. Martin's books
addictive as Dorito's
without the substance

junk

George R. Martin's books 

 more addictive than artful 

 writing Doritos

potential

Thermals leave the earth 

 with zero velocity 

accelerating

communication breakdown

Cutting cell service 

BART enraged the protestors 

 jealous of our Rights

lost in translation

The received diction 

 makes hash of Shakespeare's wordplay 

 some of it's quite rude

can you put a number on that?

Gleick's "Information" 

 tells of Szilard and Shannon 

 weighing entropy

bandwidth

Whales transpose their songs 

 into lower registers 

 hunting clear bandwidth

kill your television

If you're not outraged 

 you're not paying attention 

 quit the opiates

the Dark Side

Feral physicists 

 empowering psychopaths 

stoke Wall Street's madness

bigger fish

Crown Prosecutors 

 mean to squeeze Rebekah Brooks 

 to get at Rupert

yesh tikvah

Unhelpful answer: 

 the best time to plant fruit trees ?

 "twenty years ago"

Willard

Mitt's pathology 

 would fit right in on Wall Street 

 there, he'd be "normal"

mismatched pairs

Pairs Figure Skating 

sexual dimorphism 

 couldn't be clearer

Diogenes

Senator Sanders 

 keeps telling voters the truth 

 lonely enterprise

patterns within patterns

Stephenson's REAMDE 

 beneath the cover story 

 riffs on Gleick's CHAOS

cows don't care

The windmill's shadows 

 slash at the cattle below 

like Death's darkling scythe

fun and profit

Graceful rolling prose 

 makes money-laundering fun 

 Stephenson's "Reamde"

playing to the gallery

Sheriff Arpaio 

defying federal law 

scores points with bigots

oppressed

the Taliban's thugs 
 stamp Pashtun misogyny 
 on Afghanistan

monster

Worse than GoldmanSachs 

 evil bankers' poster child 

 Dominique Strauss Kahn

consequences

Keith Richards' drug use 

 not exactly his problem 

that's drug enforcement

proles

Globalization 

 commoditizing Labor 

 treats Men as widgets

stability without equilibrium

Negative feedback 

permeates biology 

 "homeostasis"

content

What's "information"? 

"order wrenched from disorder" 

the rest's notation

faith and credit

At the register 

 the sign says: "In God We Trust 

all others pay cash"

disequilibrium

All is transience 

 for living organisms 

 Death's the stable state

calm down, gramps!

Vegemite shortage 

 afflicts older Australians 

 kids seem unperturbed

rumors

Like Fidel Castro 

 Hugo Chavez keeps dying 

 in the rumor mill

imposition

Bicycling tourists 

clogging Amsterdam's roadways 

 hard to tolerate

message, not medium

Uncorrupted genes 

outlive the nucleotides 

that encoded them

unfit for society

if these be Persons

 what's Corporate character? 

mostly psychopaths

twisted

"Chainsaw Al" Dunlap 

 shaped a world in his image 

 sociopathic

Khartoum, we have a problem

Omar al-Bashir 

 waging his fourth civil war 

 doesn't take the hint

Green screen

Putin's limousine 

drove through an empty Moscow 

crowds drawn in later

you only get one; better make it perfect

Apex predators 

 can't bother with hamburgers 

 get the hanger steak

foreshadowed

Bin Laden's letters 

 revealed his tragic failing 

 "hates surprise parties"

Themistocles' oracle

Fighting erosion 

by reforesting the hills 

Athens' wooden wall

limp display

Kim Jong-Un's missile 

 didn't impress anyone 

 couldn't get it up

I don't think that word means what you think it means

Newt just rolls his eyes 

 might he run on Mitt's ticket? 

inconceivable!

synaesthesia? syn-anaesthesia?

The palate's deafened 

 in noisy environments 

 everything tastes bland

discreet

To hide the big guy 

 Bin Laden's basketball team 

toured the hinterlands

slow post

Troy begged the Hittites 

send aid against these damned Greeks 

camped on our beaches

brain drain

Grim economy 

Ireland turns to what it knows 

 exporting manflesh

it's all hard

Broken bones will knit 

 but sprains can last a lifetime 

 soft tissue's still hard

dilettantes

Deerflies are pikers 

 the best evolved parasites 

 don't torment their hosts

of shadows, and their things

Who's not a poet? 

 all language is metaphor 

 some's just more artful