be here now II

Life is the journey
wending towards a paradise
that you'll never reach

tantalus

Hell's a labyrinth
wending towards a Disney ride
that you'll never reach

a govt of laws and not of men

to hang Dick Cheney
would be no more than justice
as at Nuremberg

abetting after the fact

Ashcroft colluded
to spare Hayden's officers
due prosecution

arc of the Moral Universe

in "Better Angels...:"
Pinker leads us through six steps
from Hobbes towards Buddha

disbanded

Bremer's debacle
disbanding Iraq's Army
stoked civil war there

destiny

Moab is the heights
from which, Brigham Young looked out
on his Promised Land

weather window II

mobs sprout like fungi
when sun glistens on the piste
storms, I ski alone

be here now

Life is the journey
rewards are along the way
the end is foretold

purpose

wandering, aimless
not pursuing Happiness
prolonging dying

after-the-fact

non-prosecution
Obama will incur guilt
abetting torture

Imitation

Imitation Game
steals Odysseus' ploy
tale-within-a-tale

Behold! III

Ah! So Art needs mind!
but does it need creator?
or just beholder?

Behold! II

fine wax fruit is "art"
the real stuff's just "nourishment"
...unless plants have "mind"?

no room in the inns

profane pilgrimage
Augean stables of glitz
Christmas in 'Vegas

hermit

Pyongyang's gone offline
like it's living in the past
nobody noticed

doesn't promote vigor

Xi Jin Ping's regime
promotes smoking cigarettes
friend of the Devil

weather window

skiing through a storm
I have the piste to myself
sun brings out the mobs

emergent

Conway's "game of life"
makes patterns no mind conceived
where does Art begin?

what is Art?

does a hive have "mind"?
algorithms give results
that no one conceived

behold!

ants' algorithms
build what they can't envision
Art? or a rote trick?

Mamalukes

:

armed insurrection!

this year, it's New York's police

defying the State

satanic mills

the ghost of Karl Marx

would recognize Beijing's air

ripe for the revolt

unintended

the Gruen vision
bringing culture to suburbs
invented mall-rats

special

Turing--it's rumored--
might have flunked the TuringTest
not good with people

sporty

blithely unaware
middle-aged men in Lycra
mortify their wives

faux patriots

sunshine patriots
give up defending Free Speech
when anyone squawks

poorly modelled

Equilibrium
posits rational players
instead of people

spineless

Sony's cowardice
bowing to cyber-attacks
incites extortion

container for the thing contained

madelaines, like minds
absorbant, but vacuous
before infusion

worlds foreclosed

Iguala's mass graves
open on vistas of Hell
Herod's Innocents

scorching

Bulgakov's satire
more  mordant than George Orwell's
would have got him shot

HeadsUp!

Disney should worry
virtual reality
could skip all those queues

sync

poem's resonance
lighting up old connections
art of cognition

memory's metaphor

exquisitely bland
Madelaines taste of nothing
but what infused them

consciousness

mind's architecture
which bit's connected to which
defines an ego

is there anybody in there?

language as cipher
but a metaphor for what?
thought can't  quite be shared

marginal benefit

cursorial Man
gave up apes' prehensile feet
design's compromise

proto-zionists

Tolkien had explained
his dwarves wept for Erebor
like Jews for Zion

screw Dollo

cursorial birds
might yet evolve arms from wings
given enough time

mail it in

Cumberbatch's voice
rumbling in Smaug's scaly chest
rings with avarice

diplomacy's better

Fast of Gedaliah
remember Jew killing Jew
worlds that never were

shaky

Putin's stupid war
now spreads far beyond Ukraine
to shake the Kremlin

worlds unexplored

Turing's suicide
set computing back decades
the Law is an ass

to serve the public

New year, old issues
to establish public trust
prosecute torture!

no press is bad press

Kim Jong Un's censors
attempting prior restraint
gave Sony free press

mean spirited

"Bah" he spat "Humbug"
John Boehner disdains Christmas
it's not a donor

glad tidings

depressed oil prices
OPEC's fork in Putin's eye
Merry Christmas, Vlad!

textural criticism

fractional freezing
concentrates sorbets' sugars
interstitially

atheist

David Axelrod
too busy playing the game
abandons issues

Master and Margarita

Bulgakov quotes Marx
provoking Stalin to wrath
unpublished satire

plunder

orcs exploit Makers
Peter Jackson's MiddleEarth
abuts Arrakis

inefficient markets

fifty years running
Eisenhower's embargo
works for beet farmers

liar

Sandra McElroy's
calculated perjury
frustrated Justice

can't count what's taboo

Putin's popular
according to media
under his control

no press is bad press

free publicity
 blowing up Kim Jong Un's head
could pay for Sony

dropped connection

Haqqani network
now that their patron's retired
may hang for their crimes

integrationist

Obama's outreach
a dark day for beet farmers
bodes well for Cubans

encoded II

frame-shift mutation
a whole world of gibberish
one nucleotide off

encoded

frame-shift mutation
a whole world of gibberish
one base-pair away

dHannukkhah*

asymmetric war
overthrowing Seleucids
none dare say "terror"

mutual benefit

Cuba wants Gitmo
we want to shed detainees
surely we should talk?

where the rubber meets the road

farming sugar-beets
abruptly doesn't make sense
Cuba's back online

going up!

vertebrates still use
hydraulic for where it counts
metaphoric bone

calamitous

Russians are shopping
less to buy Christmas presents
than to spend rubles

revelation

a petulant God
in Ridley Scott's narrative
slakes his wrath in blood

surrogacy

firstborn of Pharaoh
smitten for sins of the State
mummy wrapped in guilt

timing is everything

in the present tense
neither Clinton nor Warren
are running--so far

how hard could it be...

N=NP?
if there were no hard problems
no encryption's safe

autocrats

new crop of strongmen
Xi, Erdogan, el-Sisi...
rally to Putin

pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

the NoiseMachine bleats:
"Brennan regrets what was done"
but winks at his crimes

Augean stables

president Frank Church
might have cleaned CIA's house
hypothetically

Jimmy's candor

voters were smitten
by Carter's sincerity
rebound from the CREEP

pursuit of Truth

Odin lost an eye
and Frank Church, a testicle
for a glimpse of Truth

progress

Wisconsin statute
names special prosecutors
each time police kill

appearance of propriety

Wisconsin statute
names special prosecutors
each time police kill

construct

ActionPotentials
Plato's binary "shadows"
impinge on my "cave"

hydrodynamics

sohxlet extractors
mimic the colon's U-turn
to void rhythmically

flexible

on her wedding day
every bride is beautiful
miraculously

levity

Jerry Ford's limo
ran a red light unannounced
Chevy Chase made hay

Joseph's brothers

teshuvah's complete
when one could re-sin the sin
but chooses better

the light hand

to make great foie gras
geese gotta believe they're free
managers: take note

thug

Xi JinPing extorts
pope to snub Dalai Lama
threatening his flock

telex?

Urim and Thummim
oracular devices
binary output

Jax

hoodless in the rain
content I'll get wet, not shot
because I'm not Black

restless street

undercover cops
incite protestors to loot
lest People back them

tactical candor III

Feinstein wants credit
publishing a summary
of crimes she condoned

class warrior

George W. Bush
advocates pre-emptive war
for the Banking Class

idle

money, like manure
stinks and benefits no one
unless spread around

crusader

senator Frank Church
under minute scrutiny
cleaner than most popes

milestone

Bandar bin Sultan
first of his generation
could be Saudis' king

leaky fence

as they lie sleeping
Texans face foreign perils
bedbugs with Chagas

prurient

Malibu Derby
bet on celebrities' homes
racing to the surf

proxies

Daniel Ellsberg knew
"we aren't on the wrong side
we are the wrong side"

unswerving

Loretta Lynch seems
a better man than Holder
to get the job done

more than the sum

geese in formation
recapture tip-vortices
it's better with friends

shadows

each mind, in its cave
reading action potentials
writes "reality"

lâcheté II

the French underwrite
Qaeda's terrorism
ransom by ransom

lâcheté

the French under-write
al-Qaeda's war-budget
ransom by ransom

call me a curmudgeon...

post-modern pizza
a crust of sprouted quinoa
taste isn't the point

rubber chicken circuit

"gluten-free pizza"
rubbery, unappealing
conceptual art?

good money after bad

guarding Sandusky
from inmates who'd slit his throat
must cost a fortune

this is only a test

getting to "aha!"
a teachers greatest rewards
aren't testable

thug

Zimbabwe's leaders
if they're not named "Mugabe"
seem oddly short-lived

exclusionary

"use immunity"
John Dean sang before Congress
like a canary

receptome

missing receptor
spares me white truffles' expense
at an unknown cost

house divided

"Two Americas"
more than the John Edwards speech
study MLK's

baseless

Dick Nixon's failings
didn't s faze Ronald Reagan
facts seemed to bore him

liars and politicians

sportscaster Reagan
if the telegraph was slow
lied with conviction

pop aesthetic

polished artistry
of claptrap stucco and glitz
Disneyland's glamor

auto-motive

academic jobs
replace external bosses
with internal drives

owned

endlessly toiling
capitalism's embrace
slowly drives us mad

artifice

hazelnut coffee
artificial flavoring
who keeps making this?

ardor

cowardly dreamers
disguise their souls in science
stars are just hot gas

the meter as message

haiku twist the mind
but he who masters sonnets
steals a woman's heart

violated

proto-fascist spooks
force secret malware payloads
into our backdoors

womb

mildewy home
a caravan of the seas
moored alongsided

fail

politicians could
be a message to  children
don't grow up like us

homeland

AIPAC policy
almighty hand, out-stretched arm
no wandering Jew

man down

de facto bike law:
if you're in a pick-up truck
you have right-of-way

lost futures

:
Fast of Gedaliah
remembers Jew killing Jew
worlds that never were

Justice delayed

:

why the cover-up?

C.I.A.'s sadistic thugs

deserve prompt hangings

pre-emptive

before he's challenged

Xi  JinPing purged everyone

more "Stalin" than "Mao"

making shit up

sportscaster Reagan
if the telegraph was slow
lied with conviction

scandalous

Jerry Sandusky
more even than winning games
loved the little guy

what "is" is

pursuit of wisdom?
or just fucking with your mind?
pop philosophy

is there anybody in there?

Plato's metaphor
do we share knowledge of it?
or did I dream that?

priorities

seven days marching
Joshua at Jericho
violates Sabbath

false premise

Ford's confirmation
asked if he'd pardon Nixon
Jerry lied to us

reality-based community

Landgrebe retorted:
"don't confuse me with the facts"
smoking howitzer

denial

last (official) lie:
"Nixon says he won't resign"
in WashingtonPost

none so blind

Barbara Jordan
changed no minds in the Congress
they'd long since been bought

dreamer

"Whole of Government
consists of being honest"
                                      Thomas Jefferson

endless

recursive problem
always "quis custodiet
ipsos custodes?"

close-up

honest portraiture
invading another's space
like half a romance

non-obvious

no bourgeois ethics
great artists don't imitate
they steal blatantly

compensating

testes atrophy
testosterone abusers
get huge (and teeny)

is that all there is?

Buber's "I and Thou"
beyond the transactional
call it "God" or "Love"

above the law

Cyrus Vance's friends
if they're police officers
don't get charged with crimes

hardened

whiskers of sapphire
insanely strong aggregate
concrete that stops bombs

escalation

Sony's new project

makes Kim Jong-un's head explode

blow-back gets messy

real stinker

flatulence humor

operation "Frequent Wind"

slipped out of Saigon

Masters of War

Mitchell and Jessen
commercializing torture
turned an neat profit

above the law

How long had Feinstein played James Clapper's whore

enabling spies she's paid to oversee?

to serve her voters seemed a dreadful bore

for one of such exalted dignity

But now they've spied on her! should we feign shock?

their files hold dirt on all, both low and high

who might by law have put them in the dock

to pass sentence on their numerous crimes

who watches over the custodians

when oversight's struck blind, and sov'reigns kneel

when Rights refract through Orwellian lens

and PATRIOT's just code for "tyranny"

don't despair yet, let's fight for what we sang

at least until we've seen torturers hang

obscured

Abraham's children
the darkness of Machpelah
obscures our shared roots

feud

who else tends these graves?
the darkness of Machpelah
lets you snub the kin

blight

nightmarish fungi
Walter Neff's bubble-houses
sprung up in the night

eldest

Bombadil chided
ditch the ring Frodo, thy hand's
more fair without it

epistemic closure

Bill O'Reilly's cave
resonates with his bullshit
facts cast no shadows

teeth set on edge

home demolitions
visit the iniquities
of sons on fathers

best man for the job II

in re Louima
Loretta Lynch showed the balls
that Holder hasn't

when the gang wears blue

Eric Garner's death
indicts the NYPD
Grand Jury be damned

bloodlines

what's a "thoroughbred"?
last bastion of racism
may be race horses

evil precedent

Holder's legacy
extra-judicial slayings
swept under the rug

dumb cop

Dan Pantaleo
"got to act like a sahib"
or risked losing face

best man for the job

Abner Louima
looms behind Eric Garner
Lynch knows what's a crime

right man for the job

in re Louima

Loretta Lynch showed the balls

that Holder hasn't

bully!

where's he facing now?
John McCain's a loose cannon
blasting friend and foe

the man for the job

Abner Louima
looms behind Eric Garner
Lynch comes with baggage

heavy favorite

2016
Chris Christie looks serious
as a heart-attack

myopic

Narendra Modi's
debts to heavy industry
charged to our planet

epistemic closure

Bill O'Reilly's cave
resonates with his bullshit
news need not apply

teflon in his ears

Reagan loved Nixon
the disdain Nixon returned
just bounced off (like facts)

addled

pseudoParkinsons
too many blows to the head
Muhammed Ali

shallow

Toobin's assessment:
Holder stood for Civil Rights
(don't mention Trayvon)

machine code

t s eliot
too cool for punctuation
didn't see the point

storm

a sky by Turner
silhouettes the Golden Gate
against mauve towers

stagey

"Birdman"--to my ear--
more actors declaiming lines
than live characters

romantic

Second Innocence
Blake ditched knowledge to reclaim
the eyes of wonder

secrets

Nixon's "secret plan"
would shut down our republic
rather than one war

imitation of life

lonely old White men
trust Bill O'Reilly for "news"
and call-girls for "love"

in bed

Robert McCulloch
cowardly son of a bitch
didn't build a case

values

lived well, or poorly
nobody gets out alive
it's "just" aesthetics

genius

"Whiplash" is brilliant
dysfunctional parenting
aspires to genius

what is known

big spoiler alert:
you can live well, or badly
but everyone dies

invisible hand

scarcely free-agents
new graduates from Law School
are born into debt

wage-slave

'til we had unions
a worker daring to vote
risked termination

We, the People

Keith Alexander
violating our backdoors
raped the Republic

well-preserved

maybe it's the gin?
Keith Richards at seventy
looks just one-twenty

tactical candor II

tactical candor
Dean sang like a canary
"use immunity"

tactical candor

"use immunity"
John Dean's own innovation
loosened many tongues

straight

heart-rending poem
scrawled on a cocktail napkin
not neat, but straight-up

blah blah blah

to control the room
consuming all oxygen
soporific talk

fish rots from the head

McCord testified

Nixon spent pardons like coins

obstructing Justiced

shalom bayit

leave it at the door!
withholding intimacy
poisons tomorrow

meaning III

what's this thing called love
GoogleCaption calls it: teens
swapping saliva

scrooged

foreclosing their dreams
Reagan imposed tuition
on CAL's undergrads

reactionary

Mubarak's cronies
repealing the ArabSpring
risk revolution

meanings II

what's this thing called, Love?
Google says it look like "teens
swapping saliva"

meanings

what's this thing called "love"?
merely the beast with two backs?
or souls entangled?

innovation

it took some vision
one fax machine is useless
but two changed the world

plutocrat

Vladimir Putin
pocketed Russia's future
new Czar screws new serfs

screwed

NSA "backdoor"
invites buggery humor
so funny, it hurts

mysterious ways

husbanding his flock
while the men march off to war
the priest beds their wives

Ferguson

real prosecutors
could indict a ham sandwich
McCulloch sandbagged

watergate I

White House counsel Dean
intimidates witnesses
top-down cover-up

beyond words

what's this thing called, Love?
putting words to the image
Google search engine

Kook

Land above Shabbos

rav Kook's Joshua proof-text

built gush Etzion

grandiose

Vladimir Putin 

wants super-power status 

delusional thug

mannequin

Stockdale's suicide
failed, but won him a medal
Dick Nixon's hero

soporific

Proust's insomnia
bequeathes us the remedy
starting with "Swann's Way"

experimentalist

we'll sort 'em later
"let a thousand flowers bloom!"
Mao flirts with Darwin

individuation

Yaakov came out
far from Rebecca's kitchen
among the livestock

sins of omission VII

McCulloch comes off
dim on the entire concept
presenting both sides

sins of omission VI

Nino Scalia
ripped McCulloch a new ass
failing to indict

stochastic

random mutations
mostly deleterious
DeepTime spawned Darwin

be here now

focusing on goals
Happiness passes us by
Life is the journey

apt phrase

in re McCulloch
pundits find the ham sandwich
irresistable

applied F&M

Suleiman Bakhit
reclaims HeroicJourney
to combat terror

troubles

violent culture
no longer sectarian
still "troubles" Belfast

joyless

losing the rat-race
hedonic adaptation
out-paces upgrades

recherche

alginate bubbles
saturate tast receptors
bursting in one's mouth

inhospitable

polar bears' picnic
spoils in the late Summer sun
for the lack of ice

unboundaried

post-Modern "Tristan"
the chorus comments on us
rather than the play

sins of omission V

Grand Juries indict
ham sandwiches or Black teens
but not the police

retarded

bad explanations
retard civilization's
progress towards Knowledge

sins of omission IV

unlike Ferguson
when the perp isn't a cop
Grand Juries indict

sins of omission III

sham prosecutors
hiding behind Grand Juries
Due Process denied

undue process

Michael Brown's sentence
condemned for Walking While Black
police playing God

sins of omission II

sham prosecutor
rather than building a case
invited the perp

California dreamin'

spare-the-air-Wednesday
Oakland's skyline dissolves in
LA-colored skies

sins of omission

when prosecutors
don't bother to make a case
perpetrators walk

the finger of God

hurricane Andrew
chose Republican districts
for devastation

Christ-like

Francis challenges:
Austerian? or Christian?
Europe can't be both

bored

suburban ennui
mall culture's no substitute
for the City's lights

songs

Second Innocence
Blake ditched Knowledge to reclaim
the eyes of wonder

prospects

each generation's
hormone-addled teenagers
inherit the world

epistemic closure

Bill O'Reilly's cave 

resonates with his nonsense 

news doesn't intrude

insufficiency

gully-washer storm

complicates Wednesday's commute

mud-slide stenoses

nadir

new moon for solstice
rounding the year's dark turn-post
moving into Light

A Theory of Everything

don't mind the physics
Eddie Redmayne's performance
is worth an Oscar

Arthur Green

"upward" is "inward"
the soul is consubstantial
with the Infinite

dread

stranded in traffic
driving a cement-mixer
doom tick-tocks closer

Ferguson

Missouri jury
came up with no indictment
the victim was Black

slow learners

planet in peril
twenty seven years later
still in denial

end of an era

when Rockefellers
liquidated oil holdings
I felt the earth move

metaphor

springing from the muck
like a mind conjured by brain
emergent lotus

controlling mom

Rivka engineered
Jacob's sojourn with Laban
to toughen him up

vayeitzeh II

Jacob was cozened
wrong bride taken in darkness
fit retribution

reprisal

Jacob bought Leah
investing with his eyes closed
rough morning after

Songs of Innocence

post-scientific
ditching knowledge to reclaim
the eyes of wonder

inward

this one's a brain-fart
others may have more to say
self-referential

retro

like equestrians
some will go on driving cars
'tho they're obsolete

SouthWest Asia

in Afghanistan
"Military Advisors"
evoke Vietnam

vayeitzeh

Jacob in grad school
somebody else's project
seven unpaid years

flexible creed

tentacled and winged
Flying Spaghetti Monster
a voile ou vapeur

"safety device"

defective airbags
in pursuit of more profit
used high explosives

artiste

"vacuous BigTime"
lost its grasp on Robert Plant
that's not where it bleeds

obstructionist

Boehner's illogic
Congressional inaction
is Obama's fault