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)

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When business grapples humans by the throat.
When holy days, unceasing, bind our souls
To flagrant commerce based on anecdotes.

Why does a tale of helpful Indians
Create a four-day lapse in useful work,
Create a massive airline traffic jam,
Allow us to engorge as if berserk?

Then Kwanzaa, Christmas, Chanukah appear—
Emerge from mythic origins. Merchants
Wallow in divine nonsense, hold sales, cheer!
And wallets gasp at made up reverence.

Just as old age devours spirit, health,
So does this absurd season swallow wealth.
(11/26/13)

Twenty-three point four degrees fixes fate,
Sets the bound’ries for our beasts, planted seeds,
Sea-deep denizens—chalks the empty slate—
Orders accoutrements to meet our needs.

We’ve learned the consequences of that tilt—
We build and plant and weave in awe of it—
Learned to deal with winter’s ice, summer’s wilt—
Learned to expect—sometimes even profit.

But never learned to brace against the doom
That tilt creates: tsunamis and simooms.
(11/30/12)

A furious storm surnamed Sandy
Whipped water and winds to a frenzy.
It struck here and there,
Laid cities all bare—
This happens when weather grows randy.

Electricity, young, rules the day
Its presence become a cliché.
It powers the phones,
Computers and drones—
Without it we’re uncooked fillets.

Consequence, often, is vaster
Than cities of staunch alabaster.
When wind, rain, and tide,
Together allied,
First crush, then create our disaster.

This country—rich in technology—
Developed dependent psychology.
But then came the storm,
Left the country deformed,
Returned us to paleontology.
(11/5/12)

Festooning Christmas, Easter—holidays
Galore—those landmark seasons of each year.
Our merchants’ joy, our families’ hoorays–
Those days off work, weekends of boozy cheer.

But ev’ry bright is shadowed by the dark.
Our bleakest season, like a threat’ning ax,
Extends three months (or more!) a rav’ning shark—
The season when we calculate our tax!

That maze of rules, the danger of rebuke—
Nauseating, enough to make you puke!
(4/28/12)

At last, the winter solstice’s passed,
The sun creeps up the arc,
And lengthened days set free those yens
That shrank beneath the dark.

Released from artificial zeal
We, finally, pursue
The joys inflaming life that’s real,
And aims avoiding rue.

Face it, the manufactured glee
That adumbrates year’s death,
Proclaims a baleful, yearning plea
For light and warmth and breath.

Embrace good sense, turn out the dark,
Stop forcing bright on bleak!
Let’s celebrate the summer’s spark,
Rejoice in sunlight’s peak!

And if (for pagans’ sake) we must
Mark solstice for His birth—
He wouldn’t mind June twenty-first,
And summer-time’s charmed mirth.
                       (1/1/10)

The winter solstice looms—again—
Relentless and interm’nable.
Though sunlight shrinks to dark, that’s when
We festifize to keep off gloom.

And yet, this dreary time of year
(Though merchants dance and grocers vie)—
Its dying light, its compelled cheer
Drive many folks to suicide.
                  (11/27/09)

Narrow spikes fatten, lean this way and that,
And grow quite tall, despite the lack of care,
A minute haven for the feral cats
That prowl and hunt and feed and linger there.

But then, as Summer dissipates to Fall,
Earth’s dirt incites enthralling miracles.
Each drab plant blooms, explodes a fireball—
Defies leached language: colorless, trite, frail.

Like an inverted crystal chandelier,
That fiery blossom reaches toward the sun;
Its jeweled palette, unconveyed to ear,
Requires eye—no poet’s word can stun

As does that bold earthbound starburst—molding
Lemon sparks, orange, ev’ry shade of gold.
                                           (9/10/08)