poetry
The Allure of Cliché: A Sonnet
Neither the moon nor stars alone allure. Celestial lips may good metaphors make, yet we can’t long mere metaphor endure: we seek cliché for companionship's shake.
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Be The Change
Meme-based Political Discourse is...Bad
The advent of the Internet in general, and tools like Google search in particular, heralded an age in which instant access to all the world's knowledge would enhance discourse, remove the traditional gatekeepers to information, and lead to greater human flourishing.
poetry
Periphery
Somewhere over Tulsa the pilot warns we’re passing through a storm. Experienced in flight, trusting the engineers who designed and built this plane, we pop headphones back in our ears, turn to our movies and TV...
Be The Change
Keeping Time
The alarm goes off at 4. I will myself to my feet, not for a grand mission, but to catch a flight. In the predawn darkness, driving the 101 to the 405, I recite Clifton, Keats, & Limón
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Guangdon
In Guangdon Province a young father rises early for work at Doubleeagle Industry Limited, where he operates the plastic-injection molding machine. It is rote, if loud and dangerous work...
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Englightenment
I was seventeen when I read Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen a couple pages at a time, putting down the book to observe sunset drape itself over my mind, falling asleep thinking of not thinking, hearing a flock of birds and imagining myself
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Sous les pavés, la plage
Too much talk of revolution makes me hungry, and there is little in the fridge that makes one believe in a better world:
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Black Friday: A Haiku
Leaves gather like un-
sold goods. Need help, asks the rake.
Just browsing, I say.
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The Naked Eye
Both the atheist and the believer have it wrong. We are not mere bodies, nor do we have souls. Heaven would be a room strewn with books and nary an errand to distract from reading;
poetry
A Humbling
Even then Dad’s knees were bad,
wincing as he crouched behind
the makeshift home plate
in our suburban cul-de-sac
which to me was as grand
as Yankee stadium, the neighbors,
I swear, crowding on balconies
to watch greatness unfold.
I did not notice how hard it was
for him to chase wild pitches
as they bounced, time and again,
into the hedges, nor the look
that would pass over his face
as he recalled the responsibilities
lying
Be The Change
A Dream of a Kind of Peace
“Children found ‘butchered’ in Israeli kibbutz...” - CNN I dream a rocket’s aftermath smells of cracked pepper, that it sprays not blood and shrapnel but mint leaves, ice clinking in delicate hand-blown glass; that its thunder is a hundred-thousand bumblebees come to pollinate a black-and-white worl
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Don't Shoot
Don't shoot the rats pillaging dumpsters, or the man with rat-like eyes and rumpled suit, who orders they be set ablaze...