Thirty innocents are murdered
At a Baghdad apartment.
Palestine keeps lobbing
Useless missiles into Israel,
Inviting air strikes
Leaving hundreds dead.
In central Africa
Christians and Muslims
Systematically slaughter
Each other.
Seventy folks were shot
In Chicago
Over the holiday weekend.
Everywhere, inspired zealots,
Responding to orders
From their one true god,
Kill the infidels.

Meanwhile
Regal oaks, stately elms,
Weeping willows
Overarch
Lotus, rose, yarrow, dahlia—
Incandescent, stunning—
Wordless poems.

Breaking news: car bomb
Kills 89 in Afghanistan.
Malaysian plane shot down
Over Ukraine for no discernible reason.
295 dead.
More wordless poems.
(7/15/14)

Those martyrs seeking orgasm
In Jannah they hardly can fathom,
Focus their wits,
Explode into bits—
Which part gets to feel the grand spasm?
(6/28/14)

Invades our lungs and livers, pales our health.
That damned filth-begotten heat will soon choke
All frail life, reach the tipping point by stealth,
Kill us all in a manner quite baroque.

And here’s the unbelievable strange part—
It’s not auto exhaust, the threat of coal,
Smokestack emissions that will smother souls—
It’s ceaseless cow methane belches and farts.

We’ve got to rid the earth of gassy beasts—
Become vegan before we’re all deceased!
(6/14/14}

When you’re eighty-four, and wake up each day
With a creaky hip and a swollen foot,
With a body stiff, pretty much kaput,
You wonder at the lyrics of decay.
Our famous Bard revealed naiveté
With metaphors for age’s attributes—
Bare boughs, dark night, cold ash—the lyric roots,
The tender images for Death’s sure prey.

Of course, he didn’t take ten pills each day,
And “bare boughs” do not convey the sharp pain
Of arthritic stabs or dread entropy—
Neither “night” nor “ashes” image the weight,
The misery, the baleful strain, the drain
Of prepping for a colonoscopy.
(3/21/14)

Find a woman,
Raise kids.
But work, always work,
Which steals your time,
Controls all thought.

Meanwhile
There’s war,
Always war,
Propelled by greed
Or ordered by
The one true god.

Then, way old,
Retired,
Beyond volunteering,
Unencumbered,
You have the space and time
To figure out what life is all about
Just before you,
Like every other living thing
On this pustular planet,
Doomed,
Die.
(2/27/14)

Flowers of content
Do not need the mulch of wealth—
They bloom anywhere.

Financiers’ passion
And bottomless greed produce
Wealth, not happiness.

Hot running water,
A roof, a loaf of bread, wine—
Happiness defined.

How do billionaires
Revel in their insane wealth
Since they, too, must die?

No inheritance!
Let’s race without advantage
And see who prevails.
(2/20/14)

Though shy at first, she loosened up, perceived
Our admiration harbored no vile threats,
And greeted us with smiles, despite regrets
That festered, generating toxic grief.

Her beauty notwithstanding, she, divorced,
Lost custody of her three school-aged kids,
Lost self-esteem, presence, stunned by the din,
The anguish, that grim experience forced
On her. She hugged Ginger, breathed fumes that rid
Her of malignant pain beneath the skin.
(2/16/14}

The stuff we yearn
To hear and taste.

But then
The daily news intrudes.

Over a hundred killed
Stampeding to a Hindu shrine.
A schoolboy shoots a teacher
And himself.
Scores of innocents killed
By careless drone strikes.
Egyptian Islamists
Raid a wedding party
At a Coptic church.
Six bombed to death
On a Russian bus.
Seven bombed to death
On a Pakistani train.
Our largest bank
Offers thirteen billion
To cure its criminality.
Twenty thousand children
Die every day
From malnutrition
And preventable disease.
Twenty thousand, every day.

All this, an iceberg’s
Puny tip.

How?
How can we heed
The happy refrain,
And just, dammit,
Just
Let the sun shine in?
(10/23/13)

We rant about the messy world,
Tell jokes, admire female skin,
Exhibit energy unfurled,
Expressing merriment, chagrin.

Night falls, the energy is spent.
We take to beds and lie awake,
Our aches and pains and old torments,
Plain venomous, entwine like snakes.

The dark is more than literal,
Becomes a metaphor for hope
Drowned in old age, funereal—
Our dreams a blank kaleidoscope.
(9/29/13)

What, one wonders, constitutes a moral
Obscenity? It means, I guess, disgust,
Unwillingness to constrain a quarrel
To bitter foes refusing to adjust.

Their venom spills, consuming innocents,
When battle violence becomes obscene
At Jericho, and concentration camps,
In Syria, when nerve gas kills, unseen.

America, empathic, won’t abide
Obscene, immoral slaughter in the East.
Our hearts, exceptional and dignified,
Forget the giant obscenity unleashed

By us on Hiroshima’s citizens
And Nagasaki’s unwarned innocents.
(8/29/13)