becalmed

Hi-pressure, windless
a Bay of hammered pewter
sears the retina

ratchet

fat's problematic
once the default point's reset
adipocytes stay

metabolism

ketones on the breath
when glycogen stores run out
smell like starvation

chianti with that?

Hannibal Lector
gave fava beans a bad name
presentation counts

allegory

Eden's innocence
bartered for carnal knowledge
"Fall"? or "growing up"?

values

civilized countries
teach teenagers to hang glide
not to build pipe bombs

common denominator

Dutch Koenigsliede
critics sing in unison
all agree: it's crap

peerless review

Reinhart and Rogoff
fooled international banks
but not Tom Herndon

economic malpractice

Reinhart and Rogoff
justified austerity
misusing data

academic harlots

Reinhart and Rogoff
gave the Bankers what they want
despite the data

energetic

cumulonimbus
terrestrial gamma rays
need no cyclotron

adoration

treated like a god
greeted with burnt offerings
each day at supper

bona fides

nuns challenged the pope:
who's living the life of Christ?
Benedict resigned

who'll field reporters?

news aggregators
do no real journalism
but grab revenue

subjective

Nino Scalia
proceeds from his biases
as if they were Law

vested interests

our Civil War spawned
Lancashire's "cotton famine"
globalization!

reformer

Beatrice Potter
fed Winston Churchill ideas
discreetly, of course

heir to empire

papal ensemble
fabulous ruby slippers
set off dowdy dress

entanglements

exalting the Land
rabbi Kook's zionism
made it a problem

beyond the words

John Gielgud advised
"if you don't know what it means /
project conviction!"

now you see the violence inherent in the system!

on the Christian Right
persecution narratives
are cherished heirlooms

friend of the devils

Thatcher picked her friends
democracies are messy
she preferred StrongMen

epistemic closure

with eyes firmly shut
the confusing world of facts
doesn't tempt Dubya

twisted

Santorum's logic
reads Malthusian squalor
as proof of God's love

tweet this

a plague of songbirds
streaked my laundry with guano
as it hung drying

GIGO

polyglot morons
babble in a dozen tongues
none of it makes sense

nonsense

dyslexics untie!
English spelling conventions
standardize nonsense

eerily quiet

where are the gold bugs?
hard currency kooks get scarce
when gold prices slide

Second Person, Singular

Kashua's novel
dispenses with libido
class drives him, not sex

not even shit

Thomas L. Friedman
strains to squeeze one out each day
often, it's just gas

cultured

what's to show for it?
baseball, Spam and Marlboros
empire's legacy

the subjective horizon

Dunning and Krager
explained workplace dynamics
Darwin-scale insight

formative

fart- and potty-jokes
in a boy's formative years
stand in lieu of sex

leave 'em wanting more

"premium content"
reserved to subscribers
shows a little leg

too too brief

internet culture
hypersexualized kids
miss out on childhood

the beam in your own

White condescension
taints proselytization
in the name of God

warm-up

scatological
humor is the exception
the rest is all sex

it's hard

pity columnists!
forced to squeeze one out each day
we hear them straining

special

among boulderers
Sharma's a phenomenon
that dude has four hands

exciting!

sex, for Santorum
means rolling the dice each time
pregnant with tension

hors de combat

"targetted killings"
carried out by civilians
are murders, not "war"

diplomacy by other means

Cheney's CIA
way beyond "intelligence"
long arm of empire

faux pas

Hollande's pet camel
stood in for him at the fete
it was delicious

vox clamentis

Senator Sanders
strikes at the corrupt machine
by doing his job

chchchchanges

Toffler's future's here!
Kurzweil's singularity
redefines all things

are there no workhouses?

Thatcher's new Britain
put the poor out on the street
to shine bankers' shoes

stigmata

inner-city 'hood
chains of gold instead of steel
still mark underclass

divided by a common language

the Yank looked flustered
"knock me up sometime" she'd said
he heard something else

meshugas

women in trousers
daven at the Western Wall
could lead to dancing!

bad symbiote

carnitine becomes
trimethylamine oxide
in carnivores' guts

abnormal

Senator Sanders
works for voters, not donors
quaintly ethical

conspiracy

black helicopters
track aluminum foil hats
right where we want them

rio

Christ of the Andes
blesses hang glider pilots
jaw-dropping backdrop

right where we want them

conspiracy fans'
aluminum foil helmets
help our drones spot them

amok

when editors doze
post-modernist narrative
sags towards word salad

serendipity

phosphatase blockers
didn't work for angina
something else came up

up in the sky!

in North Korea
a fifty-year-old U2
looks futuristic

latent heat

violent downdrafts
virga chill the atmosphere
inverted cloudsuck

values

Nietzchean bankers
grab for every buck they can
screw society

specialized

cranking and banking
would rip a U2's wings off
stall speed's near mach1

thickening

excessive moisture
coagulates the heavens
into air-pudding

latent

too high for our use
heat of vaporization
comes back as cloudsuck

stigmata

smokers' fingernails
betray their discolored lungs
for the world to see

it's personal

developing world
prosperity's tangible
it tracks with waistline

the fish rots from the head

more than sex scandals
hidden offshore bank accounts
taint politicians

bluster

al-Assad threatens
regional conflageration
when his harsh grip slips

noble savage

Frans deWaal's morals
seem innate across primates
God is optional

retrospective

Barack Obama
may yet earn his Nobel Prize
if Bibi sees sense

plasticity

with each retelling
memorate over-writes "fact"
'til it's "history"

justice for some

Holder's cowardice
spares Banksters and torturers
they're above the law

intelligence

John Searle's fallacy
over-estimates the mind
mostly, we wing it

rarified

cerebral humor
on Conan O'Brien's show
didn't sell much soap

poor value

subsidies on Coal
underwrite disease and death
and Global Warming

Holder

Holder's cowardice
undermines the rule of law
that's not "discretion"

wage-slave

H1b visas
mostly go to outsources
screwing workers here

pestlilence

abandoned assets
left in dormant bank accounts
draw lawyers like flies

betrayal

treachery on Tam
while you cavort at cloudbase
fog steals your LZ

ruthless

dispensible males
thrown recklessly into war
by rival elders

im lo achshav...

if not now, then when?
life's too short to sit and watch
when you're born to soar

hubris

SeaDrift public beach
ate another stupid sign
shifting sands chuckle

lee II

howling North on White
deserves no less respect than
strong West at Whitney

melancholia

morose guitarist
adrift in his own looper
solitary trip

unoptimized

gracile ungulates
didn't specialize in grass
only one stomach

dumb brutes

spurning lush Spring grass
deer strain for bitter oak leaves
dumber than cattle

gone tomorrow

equilibrium
drives all food-stuffs to ashes
life happens in flux

lowest denominator

prurient content
proliferates on FaceBook
must we live with weeds?

vicissitudes

four times out of five
if life's giving you melons
it's dyslexia

space

strong patents are strait
small-molecule space is vast
there's room for "me-too"

remember

opting for Matzoh
proclaims solidarity
with the world's oppressed

Thuggery

Karachi mayhem
Kayani's pet hyenas
aren't housebroken

head start

before swallowing
salivary amylase
starts digesting starch

heavenly

skull-capped cumuli
each sporting a pileus
davening minchah

a more perfect union

beyond revenue
Pigouvian tax levies
shape society

tsk tsk

clashing aesthetics
self-righteous old trad climbers
chop "sport" climbers' bolts

catabatic

Elephant Island
williwaws off the glaciers
blow rocks off the beach

platinum healthcare

at appalling cost
sacrificial virgins' hearts
keep Cheney undead

lee

North wind over White
casts Paiute launch in rotor
we never set up

the coffee works

morning camp surprise
looming out of the bushes
shovel in his hand

quills

leave it to others
it's hard to compose sonnets
on my dumbphone's screen

discrete

well-organized thoughts
conveyed in efficient verse
leave one time to think

the limit

when Wolfgang Pauli
says "you're full" there's no appeal
quantized, absolute

fidelity

through oxytocin
sex reinforces pair bonds
in some sort of vole

quitter

all flash, no real grit
when media attention ebbed
Sarah Palin quit

gag order

hideous golf pants
escape the waiters' comments
for big enough tips

intelligent design??

God-as-engineer
put recreational space
next to the sewer

monster

"bishop" Eddie Long
gagged the plaintiffs with money
among other things

moral clarity

for know-it-all teens
Dunning/Kruger fallacies
are the starting point

cronies II

Dick Cheney's cronies
made billions smashing Iraq
billed as "rebuilding"

cronies

Cheney spent trillions
on warmongers in Iraq
all off the budget

profligate

two trillion dollars
might have done something  useful
just not in Iraq

shadowed

orographic lift
wrings storm clouds out like wet rags
just before Reno

it's all uphill

Tahoe landowners
pump sewage up and over
to keep the lake blue

l'havdil

morning ablutions
set a boundary on sex
the workday begins

awkward

discontiguous
landlocked Ramallah's cut off
from Gaza's seacoast

dignity

unlike their patients
doctors opt to die at home
without all the tubes

fee-for-service

U.S. physicians
"get paid to put in more tubes"
so that's how we die

values politics

war-profiteering
made Dick Cheney a rich man
no son of his died