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)

I know, quite well, what the Bard meant when he
Evoked those stark images of age, death—
Those stripped, bare boughs, cold ash—diminished breath.
Time’s toll exacted from the life of me.
Nonetheless, I strive (sometimes with pure glee),
Determined to extract some sense—obsessed,
Despite bruised experience, with this quest
To force reason on staid authority.

Two adjectives reward my constant flings
I must admit, they fuel my spirit’s lust—
I’m dubbed “amazing” and “astonishing”—
My labors, therefore, not a total bust.
But which is best: trapped in a “maze,” alone—
Or stunned so hard you’re turned to gritty “stone”?
     (5/26/11)

Students made me a favored prof—quite nice;
And, while the appearance of my first book
Puffed me up, nothing so struck, battered, iced
My heart, set that rapturous, nerve-barbed hook,

As the last furlong of a mile-long race.
An agitated crowd howls with held breath—
Air congeals, taut skin crawls while space
Shrinks—Earth slows, stops—engenders living death!

For what? A horse race—fickle Luck’s coquette,
Life’s sky-kissed pinnacle—a five buck bet.
                                    (12/23/08)