atonement

John Boehner's penance
begins with resignation
next...endorse Bernie?

not enough

Martin O'Malley
has better hair than Bernie
but lacks the ardor

synaesthesia

Beethoven's Seventh
taunts the seated audience
as music dances

creativity

who owns the IP
if a monkey snaps selfies?
ask Marcel DuChamps

colusion

make-believe rivals
didn't call Jeb on his lies
on who "kept us safe"

you're entitled to opinions

GOP voters
trust Karl Rove's fabric of lies
feel mugged by the truth

something happened!

first sign of action
from our do-nothing congress
John Boehner resigned

real-world

there's philosophy
outside academia
that's not just wanking

what is it?

to the art critic
the problem of qualia
is existential

young and indiscrete

David Cameron's
necrozoophilia
would have crashed FaceBook

Grindr accountability

who saw this coming?
a guy called "randy boning"
sounds like a punch line

fake leftist

red mask of terror
Stalin kept Left's rhetoric
but crushed working folk

imputing intent

cyclists at trackstops
never perfectly at rest
confuse GoogleCars

foundation

dire Eumenides
underwrite the courts of law
furies in harness

malware

at no added cost
free flashlight apps for your 'phone
loaded with spyware

that's a party!

flood of endorphins
whacking a Trump Piñata
is its own reward

skin-deep

luxuriant hair
adorns such an empty head
wasted on the youth

mens rea

no mere oversight
Volkswagon's DefeatDevice
was designed to cheat

cave canem

irate chihuahua
eyes bulging out of his skull
faces down giants

unconscionable

two parking spaces
banker-class entitlement
BMW

coy

not just a recall
Volkswagon executive
perpetrated fraud

what we can do

leave it in the ground
coal mines on Federal Lands
should be shut today

on n'en parle pas

too big to mention
official French racism
screwed railroad workers

founding banker

shouldering States' debts
Hamilton forges a Union
that bankers could love

dilatory

glacier of taillights
oozes imperceptibly
through the Caldicott

overkill

CalTrans landscapers
pump mulch out pneumatically
like insulation

disobedient

Cruz, Rubio, Bush
challenge their Pope's positions
but He's with Bernie

created equal

Ozymandias
and his lowliest slave-wench
mingle as compost

unschooled

cheering drunkenly
Trumpen proletariat
pump Donald's ego

getting serious

Cruz, Rubio, Bush
challenge their Pope's positions
but He's with Bernie

location, location

restaurant FengShui
hair salons and tanneries
suppress appetite

opportunity

while Syrians die
fleeing a home become Hell
Detroit stands vacant

change

OCCUPY WallStreet
stoked political discourse
about Class Warfare

disloyal opposition

:

John Boehner's tight belt

hobbled our recovery

for partisan points

keep me hanging on

:

funny sort of race

most compelling candidate

still demurs to run

if he'd just keep his mouth shut...

plainly not too smart
Carson smashed stereotypes
about brain surgeons

specialist

old stereotype
that all brain surgeons are smart
smashed by Ben Carson

tactical

David Petraeus tamped down the daily death toll stoked up seccession

uh oh...

boreal browning

as Birnham Wood marches North

doom tick tocks closer

changing course

Occupy WallStreet
fueled political discourse
about Class Warfare

electrifying

we've seen the future
Tesla's batteries replace
all those moving parts

great investment

Bellanca Smigel
underwriting "Hamilton"
grins like the marquee

killing words

Andrew Wakefield's fraud
goes on maiming innocents
virtual landmine

image

teens' dysmorphia
Twiggie and Schwarztenegger
apostles of shame

partial

Fugitive Slave Clause
stamped our Original Sin
in Federal Law

flood tide

Lesbos is awash
in Syrian emigres
crashing on the sand

rat-hole

five hundred million
to train an army of five
Syrian Rambos

playing field

the Longitude Act
incentivized clockmakers
to get the lead out

vestigial form

crypto-metric verse
masks the rhyme scheme from the ear
rampant enjambment

crypto-metric

rampant enjambment
masks the rhyme scheme from the ear
vestigial verse-form

sideshow barker

toning Donald down
doesn't make him viable
just gives rivals air

more than the sum of its parts

deterministic
neurons add up to a mind
magic's emergent

freedom to operate

deterministic
neurons comprise John Searle's brain
that his mind rejects

Frankenstein's heirs

Miller and Urey
forged the building-blocks of life
tempest in a jar

metrical constraints

eschew enjambment!
'though one line leads to the next
each stands on its own

excluded middle

who approved this crap?
artificial sweeteners
ain't food and ain't drugs

symbiote

big pro-biotics
eggs of parasitic worms
restore gut fauna

impunity

criminal assault
by a police officer's
same as by Joe Blow

ought to be good for you

medicinal joke
Cheezy Chipotle Kale Krunch
tastes like vegemite

suspended in air, suspended in time

jet-setters' twilight
flying towards the setting sun
ablaze, unconsumed

sophisticated

handy parasites
lull the host's immune system
to treat Crohn's Disease

protest

a vote for Donald
rather than endorse his cause
mostly says "fuck y'all!"

biome

first-world bowel disease
unknown where gut worms are rife
treated by helminths

donors' boy

dark machinations
DNC's Garnet Coleman
wants Bernie muzzled

institutional bias

DNC's backroom
aligns more anti-Bernie
than pro-Hillary

packed

phage lambda's tight code
overlapping reading frames
information-dense

exceptionalism

Cheney rejects Kant
thinks himself exceptional
Devil take the rest

recalcitrant

Trump's parents were rooked
Military Boarding School
couldn't fix the brat

faithfully executed

Lynch's DoJ
means to convict real bankers
whom Holder's let off

signs to mark the seasons

celestial clockwork
crescent moon hugs morningstar
Rosh haShanah looms

trippy

pinhole cameras
formed by leaves' interstices
image each streetlight

three opinions

six hundred thousand
Jews heard G-d at mt. Sinai
yet no two agree

valuation

crucial engineer
felt himself under-valued
took rival's offer

institutionalized kink

Japanese fetish
women who squeak like infants
"pedolalia"

Red Queen's Race

invention of sex
end of immortality
genome/self shuffled

seductive

Georgia O'Keefe's art
the prominent central clefts
may be just blossoms

above the law IV

coach Hastert's students
below the age of consent
"knew" him all too well

not with the bang

old sailplane pilot
far above the impact zone
had his fatal stroke

freak

Zeb ego tripping
talked through our meditation
asserting control

know thyself

John Searle's paradox
not knowing what a mind is
thinks machines can't think

make it up on volume

seventeen thousand
vice presidents of PetSmart
hold worthless options

fruitless

Tyndareus raised
one murderess and one slut
(and twins, but no heir)

coward

'though Aegisthus hid
behind Klytemnestra's skirts
blood-guilt spattered him

boundless

knowledge is finite
but--as Einstein had observed--
ignorance is not

next

who'll topple Putin??
Mikhael Khodorkovsky
gotta top most lists

dream the impossible dream

SWF
seeks perpetual motion
if not mr. Right

above the law III

Jabba the Hastert's
coaching time with teen aged boys
sounds felonious

all things in sequence

sail-plane codgers die
high above the impact site
"natural causes"

causality

sail-plane codgers die
long before their crafts impact
"natural causes"

shocking

time-variant term
sound waves couldn't propagate
hydrostatic'ly

resistance is futile

:

senator Graham

promises he'd support Trump

who's unqualified

exceptionalists

pull up the ladder!

a nation of immigrants

pretends it's grown deaf

information content

slope and intercept
suffice to name any line
that's not vertical

non-random access

linear genomes
afford privileged access
"some are more equal"

vocational

strait curriculum
specializing in Techs-Mechs
keeps the mind narrow

identity

anonymity
preserved under a burqa
comes without freedom

of tongues and tongues

woo her with dancing
physical intimacy
goes where language can't

sleight of hand

Vladimir Putin
fearing domestic unrest
foments foreign wars

patience

sizzling languidly
more a "confit" than a "fry"
great bacon takes time

you call that a "party"?!

Donald's sneering face
sells millions of piñatas
across the U.S.

grundwerk

beyond "cogito"
knowledge is provisional
shaky induction

no form, no poetry

Tontoist haiku
serving grammar up as hash
deconstruct language

toying

Slide's forecast recedes
tomorrow always looks phat
tantalizingly

equitable

Thermonuclear
war doesn't discriminate
Ctrl/Alt/Del

anonymity

bundle of black rags
huddles in the entryway
crooning to herself

a people without a land

Arabic street signs
poised to welcome Syrians
Dearborn's half-empty

time pressure

not getting any
sperm that should look like tadpoles
have developed legs

distracted

flaccid performance
Jeb's people blame Trump's circus
for breaking the mood

layered

Georgia O'Keefe's art
the prominent central clefts
might be just blossoms

dogmatic

John Searle goes nowhere
aground on his paradox
thinks machines can't think

broad (if shallow)

Trump leads Huckabee
among Evangelicals
and Cruz in Texas

everything's personal

like Rockefellers
CalPers will divest from Coal
now Robert Byrd's dead

real Clinton

Hillary's running
mostly against the problems
she's made for herself

dual mandate

Fed machinations
to inflate WallStreet profits
wiped out homeowners

tendentious

Nino Scalia's
famously inconsistent
backfilling "logic"

indeterminate?

recursive morass
Reality's what Mind does
Mind is what Brain does...

grounded II

sea-girth Ithaka
and Penlope's embrace
hero's twin lode-stars

legacy

Neoptolemus
kept his father's genes alive
bards kept his glory

posterity II

is Thetis bereft
while we laud her shining son
unconquered in death?

posterity

does Thetis still mourn
her fling with mortality
while we laud her son?

grounded

sea-girt Ithaka
beckoned Odysseus home
without Achilles

great unravelling

lost megafauna
anchored the ecosystems
in which we evolved

vectors of change

baleen whales farm krill
transporting phosphorus up
in their fecal plumes

groundrules

NewYorkStockExchange
invoking Rule 48
starts where it left off

feudal vestige

at many law firms
unprincipled principals
exploit young interns

emergent

great chain of being
reality's what mind does
mind is what brain does...

ungrounded

fulcrumless lever
thinking about mentation
there's no place to stand

incomplete

blue sky, lonely clouds
lack only your hang glider
August, full frontal

qui bono?

to rally voters
Erdogan trumped up a war
demogoguery

out of touch

heir to a fortune
Donald doesn't understand
99%

foundation

''question everything"
Socrates' legacy
corrupting the youth

extreme vacation

tough as an old 'Stone
Keith Richards fractured his skull
dismounting a tree

feudal lords

goatish principals
love female law firm interns
(not in a good way)

uncertainty

Heisenberg taught us
to "shut up and calculate"
what doesn't make sense

inequitable

Piketty affirmed
money lent at interest
out-performs hard work

artful

concealing their craft
playing at effortlessness
poets toy with Truth

least improbable

honest scientists
find more questions than answers
pushing boundaries

precarious

deeply leveraged
400 million Chinese
can't afford their stocks

Nature abhors a vacuum

Fresno dropped Sex-Ed
pregnancies and syphilis
swiftly filled that void

this ain't Missouri

Sex-Ed in Sweden
discomforts some immigrants
who fled repression

tick...tock...

for whom the bell tolls
repercussions from China
sound grim in Brazil

construct

Vincent van Gogh's mind
painted in whole images
no one in Arles saw

behind the throne

guilt splashed Aegisthus
hiding behind the queen's skirts
while she slew the king

sword of Justice

why no thunderbolt?
Elektra's theodicy
points to Orestes

finite pie

Narendra Modi
brought Affirmative Action
to Gujaratis

fake Left

chairman Deng Xiao Ping
threw out Mao's economics
kept just the logo

cardboard clown

superficial charm
Trump's Potempkin Piety
can't mask a bigot

convergence

toothlessness evolved

both in turtles and in birds

independently

sociopath

superficial charm
Trump's Potempkin Piety
can't mask bigotry

Elizabeth

Chris Christie settled
for pennies on the dollar
stench of corruption

to be...

morose Danish prince
mired in existential angst
ponders suicide

strategic editing

Toni Morrison
pulls readers into her books
by leaving shit out

part and parcel

boom-and-bust cycles
come with Capitalism
we all need a net

acting!

from the age of ten
Reagan invented himself
no candid moment

pristine

brilliant andesite
comprises Meru's sharkfin
stairway to heaven

"Ministries"

skulking Aegisthus
hid behind Klytemnestra
but blood-guilt splashed him

family values

skulking Aegisthus
polluting his cousin's bed
trod his father's path

one-way coupling

Beijing pumped up stocks
to boost the economy
pushing on a string

affirmative action

Gujarat's Patels
protest discrimination
against the wealthy

ju jitsu

Persian equity
as we toppled Mossadegh
they toppled Carter

meddlesome

not We the People
ayatollah Khomeini
elected Reagan

stopped clock

professor Rogoff

keeps bleating "excessive debt!"

the boy who cried "Wolf!"

fire season

truncated vista
secrets of Yosemite
preserved by the smoke

insider

senator Clinton
accommodating WallStreet
can't change the system

the fuel of the past

Soros buys coal stocks
while the world is divesting
even dead cats bounce

spectateurs

French rail passengers
rescued by those brutish Yanks
never left their seats

evolving

incrementally,
party Chairman Xi Jin Ping
ditched Mao for Stalin

First they came for the Socialists...

Donald's racism
were it not towards Mexicans
would provoke a storm

shallow bench

more ClownCar tantrums
if this is the best we've got
America's doomed

a little dull

Jeb's too-late riposte
Trump's really a Democrat!
 and brays like an ass

banking on debt

even Keynes endorsed
paying down debt in good time
Krugman goes further

clubby

favorite T-shirt:
all good lawyers know the Law
great ones know the judge

clean

"half-dead Englishman"
Keith Richards' own turn of phrase
cleans up pretty good!

blather

without specifics
Trump peddles pie-in-the-sky
to the ignorant

'toons

Zoomorphism
paints Donald Trump as "jackass"
and Jeb as "roadkill"

empty suit

Fiorina trusts
that voters won't (or can't) read
her record to date

making it real, making it universal

Martin Luther King
quashed understandable rage
to effect real change

downward

Greece is on the hook
borrowing to service debt
digging in deeper

antigen

Donald's effective!
registering Latinos
to vote against him

contagion

China gets a cold

partners suffer pneumonia

a hard year for BRIC

gleem

shooting Redford's face

unnaturally white teeth

trick the light-meter

always pose with the ugly ones

flattering contrast

Trump, in the ClownCar debate

didn't look stupid

flattering background

Donald Trump's ego

bestrides the ClownCar debates

like a colossus

vicarious virtues

out-of-state offsets
bury carbon somewhere else
while Hollywood burns

offshoring

Cronies of Putin
not trusting his affection
buy homes in London

designed by a committee

Satiric snackfood?
"Cheezy Chipotle Kale Krunch"
seems more spoof than food

yep. She's a Clinton

is not "TopSecret"
a subset of "Classified"?
Is a blowjob "sex"?

smog II

Diablo blens in
to a vaguely orange sky
like Fujiyama

short memory

Bush family values
Jeb wants a third Iraq war
but no one wants Jeb

smog

Sierra Madre
mountains sprout in the backyard
when the wind swings East

steel wheels

but the meaning's changed
"not a dry seat in the house"
as 'Stones fans grow old

low-man

not getting ahead
over-active gag-reflex
precludes promotions

alpha

HouseSpeaker Hastert
learned Washington's power game
screwing his students

mired

Iowa's lagging
as Sanders surges ahead
geriatric state

predatory

once it shed BellLabs
AT&T management
turned to the DarkSide

corporate bias

FauxNews profits lie
with the Donald Trump Circus
no journalism

establishment bias

Bernie's up against
the senator from WallStreet
and her media

low expectations

Jeb faults Hillary
for the collapse of Iraq
as if she's a Bush