What animated
Thoughts roil the brains of two men
Viewing that last slice?
What philosophical view
Empowers the man who wins?
(8/16/14)

Two yeshiva boys
Eyed the last lush tasty slice.
One snatched it and bit.
The other snarled, “impolite!”
The first smiled—“and you’re moral.”
(8/16/14)

I used to go to meetings, speak and write,
Obsessed with sense, with rationality—
Convinced we had the tools to mend, despite
The obscene rants of nationality.

Alas, how wrong could one man be, not see
How hatred—preached in mosques, and synagogues,
In Hindu temples, church—shaped history?
How faith and greed and demagoguery

Combine to overwhelm philosophy—
That love of wisdom doomed to atrophy.
(5/8/14)

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)

Throw some coins into that beggar’s cup
Even if the sod’s an addict drunk—
The act’s plain virtue.

The phone call from the American Diabetes Society—
“Help us end this horrible disease.”
OK—put me down for a hundred bucks—
I could use some virtue.
But wait!
205.7 million rolled in last year—
The fundraisers kept 29.2 per cent—
A mere 57.7 million—
And Larry, the CEO,
Brought home a salary
Of five hundred forty-five thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars.
Who knew diabetes could be so fulfilling?

Take a look at our beloved ASPCA—
You know,
The outfit that saves those sad yearning hounds
And bereft kittens
Shown, relentlessly, on our TVs.
Those tragic cats and dogs
Generated over a hundred forty-eight million
In virtuous donations.
But wait!
The fundraisers kept 52.7 million
Of those alms.
And Edwin? The CEO?
That lout drained five hundred sixty-six thousand
To help with the rent and the groceries.

For pity’s sake, ask yourself:
How do my donations serve?
Do they mitigate poverty,
Soften pain,
Enrich the arts,
Or contribute
To entrepreneurial,
Orgasmic riches?

Looking for virtue, self-esteem?
Give the drunk a few bucks—
Stop being played
Like an out-of-tune fiddle.
(1/11/14)

December twenty-first
And my mortgage—
A poem a week—
Remains unpaid.

I jotted notes
Wrote two titles
Even made a quatrain,
But could not complete
A single verse.

My first remarks
Defined the power
Of unregulated greed—
The fertile seeds
Of revolution—
To crush humanity
Reduce this shining city on a hill
To chaos,
Leaving cold ashes
In its place.

But I’ve tolled that bell
So often that it’s cracked.

“Interest,” I thought,
“An interesting word.”
It’s what you get from lending,
Pay to borrow.
But, significantly,
It’s what makes life bright.
Imagine, if you can,
A life devoid of interests,
Except, perhaps, the meds
Reducing pain;
That’s what lies ahead.

Which, of course, leads to self-interest.

Born to melancholy
And suspicion,
I distrust those
Who seem to want to help.
I find the mission
Of most charities fictitious,
Fraudulent scams,
Enrichment schemes.
My doctor called—
Asked me to come in.
My first thought was
A milking plot
To bilk my Medicare
With fees for services,
Lab tests and the like.
But someone set me straight—
Providers get a capitation fee
And nothing more,
Which made me think
A darkest thought—
How Medicare’s prosperity
Would flourish
If they could introduce
A tiny “de”
In front of my
“Capitation.”

I made my living teaching poetry
Beguiled my students
With the mysteries
Of form, aesthetics, melody.
I’m much older now
And look back with a modicum
Of guilt.
I lectured fervently
On that famous ode
That ends:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Perhaps some threads
Of truth are woven into beauty.
But to argue that truth
Is beauty just boggles.
I wonder how much beauty
Keats found in the truth
Embodied by the long,
Agonizing illness
That killed him
At the age of twenty-six;
What beauty radiates
From our planet’s history
Of storm, disaster, plague,
And ceaseless war?

Perhaps,
Without a 23.4 degree tilt
In the axis of our Earth,
We might be freed
From the deadly chill
And morbid heat
Gifted by those
Solstices.
(12/21/13)

Tell me, what is it that we humans want?
Fish, insects, birds and animals, content
With food, with space, with nature’s bounteous flaunt,
Eschew our rage, and angst, our discontent.

Ten thousand feet of living space, toilets
On every floor, an Aston Martin
Parked at the door, a gleaming private jet,
Stuff piled on stuff—luxuries that hearten.

Despite our fulfilled needs, failure to gain
Outrageous wants engenders human pain.
(11/21/13)

An intellectual, perhaps Voltaire,
Perhaps Diderot, many years ago
Reflected on our freedom and welfare
And determined what everyone should know:

“Men,” he proclaimed (women too—human yeast)
“Will never be free until the last king
Is strangled with the guts of the last priest.”
Mercifully, he never saw new things—

He never saw the dark enslaving source
Controlling worship, governments, and banks—
Birthing our greedy corporations’ force
With Wall Street traders’ horrifying pranks—

Far worse than priests and kings—alligators!
Reptilian beyond all decency,
Secret financial manipulators—
Parasites—sucking up our currency.

We never will be free until, benumbed,
They choke to death on their own bilious scum.
(11/15/13}

But folks rebelled: “We want a king to rule!”
Old Sam tried his best—warned that evil kings
Would rape their daughters, draft their sons, and fuel
Their reign with nasty tax on everything.

They got their king—good looking, rich, and tall—
Along with endless stress—who really ruled?
Universal struggle, fierce, mindless brawls
Twixt clerics and their monarchs never cooled.

Solomon built his temple with corvée—
Monarchs pray, kneel to kiss the bishop’s ring—
Some foreign states collect tax, to this day,
To help those churches do their awful things.

Not hard, I guess, to understand that fling
We read about—that flash German bishop
Spent 40 million bucks to tune his digs up.
Clergy rules! The proof: our Bishop of Bling.
(10/30/13)

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)

Occasionally
I canonize a pet,
Exalt my wife and sons,
And revel in the mystery
Of sun, moon, stars.

But mostly I decry
The mess the masses
Have contrived
Through advertising,
Greed, theology, and politics.

For three thousand years
We’ve preached morality,
Teach it in school,
Then graduate into
Murderous, insane reality.

If ever a book
Of my bitter verse appears—
My history of ego and of nations—
Its title will declare its motivation:
A Sequel to The Book of Lamentations
(9/26/13)