alienated

sign me "curmudgeon"
millionaires playing kids' games
don't seem important

all language is metaphor

hereditary
depression prediliction
in shorthand: "blue genes"

non consensual

whose is this jackass?
George Wills' concept of rape
sounds like the Mullahs'

iron fist

HongKong's reversion
hasn't softened Beijing's stance
Orwell,  by the book

new map

Mosul has fallen
ISIS rips a bleeding hunk
from Iraq's carcass

driven

nine parts of Desire
Allah bestowed on Woman
two would drive Man mad

lash

Hell hath no fury...
the wrath of a woman scorned
could freeze the noon sun

allegory

phallic imag'ry
that finger the spindle pricked
princess' hymen

interventionist

hang Paul Wolfowitz
from the Tree of Liberty's
dead branch in Iraq

encoded

Greek art convention:
the tiniest genitals
were painted on gods

bring in the clowns!

comedians' prayer
John Bolton for president!
circus comes to town

Kurdistan

ain't nothing sacred
about the Sykes-Picot map
Kurds deserve a state

heartless

neocon zombies
uncaring they've been shot down
peddle a new war

PDA

Secretariat
before giving up the ghost
licked his favorite dog

fat tigers

selling off billions
family of Xi Jinping
scramble to look clean

sold! II

Belgium would dissolve
except that its OnePercent
needs the tax-haven

better

weekend at Tahoe
cream, butter, duck fat and lard
Scott's in the kitchen

marketing

carbon monoxide
makes myoglobin redder
to sell old tuna

narrowed

night's infinite sky
collapses to mere arms' lengths
in the campfire's glare

fetchez la vache!

hail Paul Wolfowitz!
acclaimed "most destructive tool"
in our arsenal

contagion

war comes to Lamu
threatening the tourist trade
Kenya could go broke

sleuthing

neither fish nor fowl
growth rings in dinosaur bones
show they're mesotherms

indistinguishable from magic

Maxwell's equations
made what had seemed arcana
comprehensible

mutable as water

winds harrow Tahoe
what was yesterday's mirror
today, stands in hills

de gustibus non disputandum

Spam cubes en brochette
peak of Hawaiian cuisine
pairs well with cola

inexorable

grasping at lost youth
elaborate manscaping
can't scrape off the years

net

to claim their full worth
tract homes in Palo Alto
ought to get bulldozed

Progress

each generation's
cartoonishly violent
viewed in retrospect

coy

incomplete census
fastidious archaea
spurn your agar plate

ruled II

contrails drift downwind
a sky ruled for penmanship
by a single route

perfect storm

high-school teachers' hell
suicidal teen-aged girls
taunt sex-addled boys

know thyself

Rand embraced Nietzsche
each, puzzled to be unloved
blamed everyone else

ruled

sky as gridiron
wind displaces each contrail
along the same route

distributed intelligence

Morgul blade fragments
worming in towards Frodo's heart
weird technology

in a glass, darkly

clashing prophecies
Piketty's and Pinker's books
catch a world in flux

sacrifices must be made

ranks of perfect teeth
to conform to Fashion's norms
durance in braces

over-reach

attempts to patch leaks
NSA Surveillance runs
through private freedoms

common ground

politics of pot
regardless of stance, stoners
agree on waffles

values

our SCOTUS supports
segregation and child porn
moving overseas!

what goes up...

photovoltaic

hats can keep your head cooler

when you draw current

who thought that?

right-brain, and left-brain
Calvin and Hobbes incarnate
two-stage cognition

terse

fiction's pinnacle
in 20th century
still, Calvin and Hobbes

asserting control

night's infinite sky
collapses to mere arms lengths
in the campfire's glare

arousal

courtship behavior
so hard to tell from combat
'til the pregnancy

sacremental

Jamaican ganja
for religious purposes
decriminalized

that "vision" thing

Gorbachev worked for
a Russia of the Future
Putin wants the past

the center cannot hold II

Eric Cantor's out!
the Party of Dysfunction
belongs to the Fringe

the center cannot hold

strange economist!
Dave Brat's Princeton diploma
reads: "theology"

upset!

"Brat upsets Cantor!"
one week 'til his bar mitzvah
hasn't learned the trope

punchy II

all those syllables!
had Kant written in haiku
he might get read more

punchy

Kant lacked discipline
had he written in haiku
he might get read more

'til you get it right

TomCruise's death-scenes
throughout "Edge of Tomorrow"
add punctuation

headlines

Brat upsets Cantor!
one week from his bar mitzvah
hasn't learned the trope

architecture

de-serialize!
"as strong as its weakest link"
constrains chains, not hives

get real

unspeakably quaint
rather than Goo or Soylent
this grocer sells "food"

sans frontieres

Earth as "battlefield"
had been the stuff of SciFi
until Cheney/Bush

self-determination

L. Paul Bremer's coup
undercutting Jake Garner
screwed the Kurds, again

self-determination

L. Paul Bremer's coup
undercutting Jake Garner
screwed the Kurds, again

self-determination

L. Paul Bremer's coup
undercutting Jake Garner
screwed the Kurds, again

bad monotheist

in St. Paul's writings
homosexuality
comes from beyond God?

non-self-execting

Law, once enacted 

doesn't need two rows of teeth

treaties count for naught

cover-up

warrantless wiretaps
Bill Keller's complicity
didn't make the news

categorical imperative

ask any snowflake
as the avalanche kills you
it pleads "not guilty"

practice makes perfect

"Edge of Tomorrow"
"GroundhogDay" with explosions
plays across genres

synthetic biology

McCormick's virus
cells lacking p53
die, selectively 

off-loading

artist share it all
exorcising their demons
they give them to us

craft

insincerity
comes naturally to Bill
Hillary's seems strained

tenured

does even John Yoo
read the crap that John Yoo spews?
he's incoherent

illiberal

militarized cops
criminalize everything
who's gonna say "no"?

clear enough

bananas flambé
served on Dan's yeasted waffles
brunch fit for a queen

smug

sailplanes below me
not bothering to circle
figure they're home free

blinded

gazing into night
the cosmos looks limitless
'til you light that fire

oh, grow up!

Nietzsche incarnates
adolescent fantasies
a life above laws

aimless

produce-aisle traffic
uncaffeinated housewives
meander like kine

winged guardians

a torrent of bats
spew from Sacramento's bridge
into the twilight

brewing

each, an only child
Tiananmen Square massacre
snuffed ten thousand dreams

appropriate tech

roof the aquaduct
with photovoltaic cells
pump the grapevine, free

how do you encode that?

atavistic fear
sabertooth cats prowl our dreams
on ayahuasca

Job

obsessing on "why"
confronting meaninglessness
Job espouses Faith

protected noxious press

for the connoisseur
of bad film there's "Burning Blue"
twaddle as art-form

vexing

buying hostages
gives terrorists incentives
to grab someone else

character

in Tiananmen Square
one brave man defied the tanks
no one knows his name

slurp

vast vacuum cleaner
fit for draining septic tanks
slurps up prairie dogs

looking forward

in life, as at sea
cutting away trashed rigging
stings, transientlyl

local

windward rainforests
contrast with lee-side deserts
Hawaiian "normal"

illegitimate

Egyptian voters
stayed away from polls in droves
few endorse this sham

capped

a hot day is hot
because convection's suppressed
high pressure, scant lift

feedback loop

neurotic women
train their dogs to snap at men
resonant in bitch

she's gonna blow!

after Tiananmen
Chinese officials grew rich
repression doubled

Darwin's winners

therapeutic 'phage
mutating relentlessly
kills resistant bugs

human capital

cheap labor means less
as grunt work gets mechanized
robots scare China

real life's not like that

ubiquitous porn
deludes women just how fast
a plumber shows up

particular talents

it takes a village
Dylan's trenchant words deserve
someone who can sing

complicit II

for tyrants world-wide
the GlobalWar on Terror
constitutes carte blanche

complicit

Cheney's pals, world-wide
say "Global War on Terror"
but mean "genocide"

parochial

where's Putin's outrage?
a Uyghur referendum
speaks to his values

selfish

Fred Nietzsche channelled
adolescents' reveries
but he's just a jerk

composting

shit-eating vermin
service Scott's Walt'sPoint  latrine
fresh for every flight

low

deep on Sanhedrin
even "FarAway Ranch" seems
aspirational

bitchy

only by contrast
Searle's outstanding in his field
he beats others down

non-resonant

can it be music?
when each note is a surprise
listeners flounder

Din/Chochma

Justice can't suffice
in Aeschylus' concept
Wisdom makes it work

liberator

Cyrus of Persia
kicked Babylonian ass
old-school Moshiach

Polis

the Social Contract
as Aeschylus conceived it
required patron gods

and then, darkness

Death claims one more vole
in downy outstretched talons
noiselessly, by night

knowing when to leave

most thermals slow down
before you can reach cloudbase
love 'em and leave 'em