Bandits. Extortionists.
Corporate pirates.
The worst of the worst.

New year? They jack up the rates.
Springtime? They jack up the rates.
Summer? Autumn? Ditto.

Expenses the excuse.
Inflation the excuse.
Hell, they don't need an excuse,
they're Big Cable *******,
so **** it.

Customer Service?
Incompetent or worse,
rude aggressive, dismissive
and incompetent.
A joke.

Tired of dealing with you?
They hang-up or leave
you hanging. Dead air.
You're welcome Buddy.

Shameless. Insulting.

Done with the b------s.
Good-bye and good riddance!

Are a house on stilts
in shifting sand
in the path of a tsunami

Sometimes the best ideas come when you paint
yourself into a corner,
it forces you to sprout wings
and fly your way out.

I didn’t go, you didn’t stay
We never went to Mandalay
I clasped my hands but couldn’t pray
And asked is this the Milky Way?

An exhibition and
Michelle Kwan skating
to the Tori Amos song
"Winter"

Not yet knowing
that the Olympic Gold Medal

she so desperately craves
and deserves will
forever elude her

Is boring and hard.
There are those
you despise.
There are those
who despise you.
In the cattle car
classrooms and corridors,
you cannot avoid them.

The teachers are smart
but not too smart.
You, of course,
are not so smart.

The hours pass
like a slow moving
train filled with nothing much.
It is difficult to pay attention.

You will eventually move on,
but not really.

This is your life.
You will learn to like it.

They laughed when, hands
bound behind his back,
he ran deliberately headfirst
into a wall to try and escape
the pain

When it didn't work
they jeered and mocked

He wasn't getting off that easily

For Brian

Yeah the pay’s okay, but it’s five long days
Of hard, ****** work plus, maybe
Another half day, then it’s off to the bar
On a Saturday night to get completely blotto
And try and forget the whole lousy week.
Maybe you get in a stupid fight
Or pass out or whatever, anyway
You wake up with cotton-mouth
And a terrible hangover.

Your high school sweetheart, who lied
To you about birth control
So that now she’s a stay-at-home mom
With two kids for you to support,
Is already up and out of bed
But she’s cranky. You groan and mope
Around, spend the day doing
Household chores or watching the tube
While the kids make a racket,
The clock ticking down all the while.

Come Sunday night, if the wife’s
In a generous mood, you might get
Lucky but don’t count on it if it isn’t
Your birthday or a special occasion
And in bed, before you drift off,
It’s all you can do to hold back the tears
Because this what you have to look forward
To for the next thirty or forty years
Unless you fall off a ladder first
Or have a heart attack.

No wonder you’re four times
As likely to unalive yourself
As someone in the general population.

Before I won the big jackpot,
I'd pretty much lost my faith
in human nature. But after word
got out things changed.

Some of the jocks who used to
slam my head into the lockers
in school called me up to chat
and see how I was doing. And
the girls who'd shot me down
and laughed in my face over
the years texted me on facebook
and asked if we could get together.

Even my mom who ran off
with her affair partner and went
no contact for twenty years
got in touch and said she wanted
for us to reconnect.

Everyone's been so nice!
I guess people aren't so bad after all.

Not a thought did I think
Not a word did I write
No tea did I drink
Not a foe did I fight

Not a mile did I walk
Not a page did I link
No door did I read
Not a putt did I sink

Not a patch did I ****
Not a meal did I make
No book did I read
Not a meme did I fake

Yet here I am, here I sit
Excuse me while I throw a fit

How rich am I?
I wrapped my Royce
Around a tree
And walked away
Without a scratch.

They say he was born running
and, a little later, he proved it,
toddling around in a diaper,
a fake grin on his face,
later yet, gripping hands and kissing babies,
making promises--a milk bottle
in every fridge and plenty of Gerber--
he couldn't keep, riding in the parade,
waving at the crowd, always hustling,
chasing votes, always on.

Poor *******.

You give them money
and, for a minute or two,
they pretend to like you.

Most, if not all of them, despise you.
Who can blame them?

If I'd known, I wouldn't have died

JFK, a bird-******* fool, maybe worse.
Bill Clinton, a bird-******* fool, maybe worse.
Ronald Reagan, that amiable date-*****.
George H. W. Bush, notoriously handsy.
Joe Biden, also handsy.
Donald Trump, a good old fashioned ******.

The best and the brightest.
The dumb *****. Not so different.

Yes indeed, we're a ***** bunch.

Rambo Jr. mugging
for the camera, little rooster
cocking around.

See his backward cap?
See his AK-15?
Isn't he the coolest?
Isn't he a Sport?

Looking for trouble?
No, begging for it.

And finding it.

So that, when the little
Dork trips over his own feet,
he comes up firing.

Isn't that what he came for?

In court now,
in suit and tie,
his chubby white face
reeking of privilege.

On the stand, coached
by his high-priced lawyers,
not quite as dumb
as he looks on video.

Such a nice boy!

The chatty judge,
half-senile, loves him.

And the white jury?
They do to.

So the little *******
gets away with it.

In this one, the psychopath isn't Hannibal Lechter,
instead he's intellectually challenged.
But that doesn't stop him from causing mayhem.

Feel free to go with it.

You wanted a ticker tape parade.
You wanted a Rolex.
You wanted a closet filled with designer clothes.
You wanted a trophy case the size of a yacht.
You wanted to be Lebron James.
You wanted to be David Bowie.
You wanted friends in High Places.
You wanted an arena full of screaming fans.
You wanted The Grand Prize.

What you got was a quiet country road
and sensible shoes to walk it.

That's more than enough.

Sign up.
Shorten your life.
Make an orthopod happy.

A slug slogging along
The surface of the pavement
And arriving.

It's not a dream.
It's not a nightmare.

Go Buddy, go!

Meghan McCain
is correct on this one.

The Chinese elite raised
on repression, torture
and butchery, carry on
with repression, torture
and butchery.

But Big Money talks
and the IOC plays
a game of let's pretend.

And Peng Shuai?
Her ****** is probably
first on the list for when
they harvest her organs.

I apologize in advance.
For the stale cliches,
mixed metaphors,
lack of metaphor,
for the generic flowers,
the pretty butterflies,
the mountains that
inevitably invite climbing,
for the references
to Icarus and Sisyphus,
for the name dropping
and dubious allusions,
for the lack of creativity
and imagination,
for the lack of skill,
for the lack of distinction,
for everything my poems
are not and never will be

Sandusky, Cosby, Madoff:
the wives riding the gravy train,
turning a blind eye

Sandusky: hiding upstairs,
ears finger-plugged, humming
to herself--whatever the Big Goof
was up to down in the basement
with those young boys
none of her business

Cosby: Disarming
his accusers with fake charm,
posing as a good friend while studiously
ignoring all those silly allegations,
as if her Dearly Beloved Meal Ticket
really was America's Favorite Dad
and not America's Most Famous
Serial Roofie-em First ******

Madoff: Hiding assets,
mailing her kids a million dollars
worth of jewelry and trying to keep
it a secret, on TV, she's so, so sorry,
never suspected a thing (okay Pinnochio)
moving now into a pricey mansion,
snacking on caviar again

And the victims? Too **** bad

On my deathbed,
my bony finger
will reach for
the keyboard
like Adam's finger
reaches out to God
in Michelangelo's famous
Sistine Chapel painting
and hit, "Delete All."

Take a "moderately gifted" child,
expose him to a crazy stepmother
and let nature take its course.
Mission accomplished.

What do I know about horses?
What do I know about the female point of view?
What do I know about how mathmaticians think?

What do I know about Quantum Mechanics?
What do I know about the Appalachian Trail?
What do I know about a mother's rage?

"Write what you know," advises the manual.
Okay.

So let's forget about the horses.
And the article on Reverse Transcription.
Oh what the heck!
Let's just forget about the poem altogether.

Forget it.

Like flies on stink.
Like hair on a gorilla.

The ghouls and goblins.
The rubberneckers. The media.

Here the camp.
Here the shrine.

They gasp. They cluck.
They repeat and repeat.

Until the next one.
Until they pick up and move on.

Treat us like children
or, worse, idiots

Like we're recently
sprung from The Clinic,
our lobotomy scars still fresh

They tell their clients that this
dumb-down strategy works

Sadly, they're probably right

Was not as bad as some
people say it was

It was worse

Since I pulled up stakes
and ditched this hellhole
chances are the only time
I'll soil the pages
of my s**y hometown paper
again will be in the obits
when I croak.

No more drunk and disorderly
notices. No more photos
of me at anti-government rallies.
No more of my letters to the editor.
No more misleading articles
about the squabbles with my
puke-faced neighbors or my
allegedly delinquent tax payments.

So go ahead you crap-heads and find
someone else to kick around.

This dog is long gone.

It goes without saying
That what you leave out
Is as important as what you put in

Which reminds me of Tim O’Brien,
In the first draft of a war story
He left out the ****-field,
A mistake he rectified later
And the whole tone changed significantly,
Made things more gritty and real

Or so he claimed

Maybe he planned on putting
In the ****-field all along,
An author’s prerogative

True or not,
It makes a good story

Remember Eden,
The Tree Of Life,
the forbidden fruit.
Remember Commandments.

"Thou shalt not invade
and subjugate a sovereign country.
Thou shalt not fire upon civilians.
Thou shalt not threaten nuclear war."

Take note little KGB stooge:
The territory you covet
does not belong to you.

"Thou shalt not drop bombs
on schools and hospitals.
Thou shalt not torture dissidents.
Thou shalt not ****** journalists.
Thou shalt not exploit and steal
from you own countrymen."

Little Butcher, Little Troll:

This time, you've gone too far.
This time, you've done it.

Ukraine is not yours to pilfer.
The good citizens will defeat you.
You will not and cannot win.

And on Judgment Day,
The God you disdain will
have something to say.

Wouldn't want to be you Mr. Putin.

Aren't we precocious?
Aren't we smart?
Reading at three,
learning poems by heart.

Aren't we precocious?
Aren't we clever?
Writing stories at six,
what an endeavor.

Aren't we precocious?
Aren't we sharp?
Staging plays at nine,
a bit of a lark.

Aren't we precocious?
Aren't we keen?
Making movies at twelve,
blocking out scenes.

Aren't we precocious?
Aren't we the bomb?
Multitasking at sixteen,
skipping the prom.

Aren't we precocious?
Aren't we a lock?
Making bundles at twenty,
buying houses and stock.

Aren't we precocious?
Aren't we the ****?
Rich as Midas at thirty
getting high, getting lit.

Aren't we precocious?
Aren't we sick?
Bankrupt at forty,
we're losing our schtick.

Aren't we precocious?
But where is our head?
Not even fifty
we're spent, then we're dead.

Start with a little girl's muddy drawers,
toss in some dialect, stir in some Shakespeare

Add the bellowing of an intellectually challenged man

Add a suicidal sibling, a sassy young black boy,
a dose of Southern ambience and wallah

You're William Faulkner

Sick of it yet?

A fighter jet turns on the afterburners
but no false absence confuses me

The antidepressants I take
dull what I recall of pain

Though a ghost of it remains
though I see mostly clouds

Yeah, there's a mime,
a sad clown and, at the end,
the lingering shot
of a balloon, string trailing,
floating skyward until
it's a mere speck on the horizon.

But really it's about ***.
It's always about ***
and the pseudo-intellectual B.S.
you've come to expect.

Still, I've seen worse.

Because next week’s coin flip
Is so important to the franchise,
I’m hiring a consultant to help me.

Looking through a stack
Of resumes, I’m liking this one:

“I have nearly forty years of experience
Advising clients on this topic.
I have witnessed thousands upon thousands
Of coin flips in hundreds of venues.
I have written dozens of papers
On probability and the various factors
Involved in making this difficult decision.
I will employ charts, graphs, metrics
And can explain in detail your options all
For a reasonable fee. Don’t try this
On your own. You need an expert.”

Yep. Think I’ve found my man!

Is not a test or a game
or an experiment,
it's an inevitability.

Don't want to play?
Too bad, you don't have a choice.

Fix it. I can't fix it.
Fix it. I can't fix it.
Fix it. I can't fix it.

I can't fix it.

Desiring a long life,
I renounced Pleasure,
Distraction, Fun--

Like a Buddhist monk--

And offered my delinquent
but pliant body
to the waterboard,
the smoldering cigarette,
the clenched fist,
the medieval rack

In the dungeon basement,
screams unheeded,
the seconds passed like hours,
the hours like days,
the days like years,
the years like millennia,

Each excruciating moment
impossible to elide or ignore,

I felt as close to Eternity
as a mortal man can get

Mirror, mirror on the wall
who's the most wicked of them all?

Putin.

Disclaimer: It's a hard
and dangerous job and there
are plenty of good cops
and God bless them
but as for the others:

Cops Lie.
They lie and lie.
They even lie when there is video.
They lie even when their lies
are plain to see.
Clearly, the blood and broken nose
are from the victim smashing
his own face into the pavement.
The welts from repeatedly ramming
his head into that peace officer's baton.

If Attila the *** were a cop,
the police union would vigorously
defend his innocence.
He's a fellow officer, after all.
And if anyone on the force,
including the Police Chief,
disagrees the Union backers will
do their darndest to get him fired.

Now, imagine how much worse
it was before cell phones, before video.

Brutal.

She comes to my dorm room
from a frat party,
face flushed
stinking of beer.

She rubs herself against me,
tells me how much she loves me,
misses me.

I let her calm down a little
before I ask her,

"So, who've you been
making out with this time?"

They're smarter than the scientists
who've studied climate change for years.

They're smarter than the doctors
who've studied vaccines and viruses for years.

They're smarter than the intelligence officers
who've worked in the field for years.

They're smarter than any rocket designer,
any chemist, any physicist, any structural engineer.

And they're way, way smarter than you or me.

And what makes them so smart?
How do they know so much?
How did they discover THE TRUTH?

Why, they read all about it on the internet!

After the editor
dissected my manuscript
with a sharp red pencil,
he handed it back
and I said, "you killed it,"
to which he replied,
"it was already dead."

Open a book
To any old place
And have a look

Chances are,
You’ll find something
Of value

Pet owners: got a dude,
a feller, a sweet male
cat, dog, pigaroo?

Choose tiny snip,
not big rip.

think about the clinic
and your boy,
your bestest buddy,
waking groggily
to the shocking absence.

Say no to mutilation.
Say yes to a vasectomy.

Let the boys be boys,
Save The Nads.

So, yeah, Lear
had three lovely daughters . . .

And, yes indeed, Ahab
was obsessed with a white whale . . .

And, sure enough, Scheherazade
feared for her life . . .

And, uh-huh, Lucifer tried
to stage a revolt . . .

And so it goes,
mixing the sacred and profane,
the sublime and mundane,
in prose both fancy and plain.

Offered up to you, the listener,
the reader, the consumer

by various authors
with their various agendas

"Friend, lend me your eyes,
your ears, your undivided attention,"
they implore

It's up to you whether
to accept the invitation or not

Blind faith, idolatry.
So tempting.

Though it's almost always misplaced.
Though our heroes always fail us.

Not their fault.
We expect too much.
We expect the impossible.

Open the cage door.
Let them go.

I'm sorry. I have done
all that I can for you.
The surgeries. The chemo,
the bone marrow transplant,
the cocktail of toxic drugs,
each treatment more desperate
than the last, were to no avail.
I have consulted with colleagues,
scoured the medical journals.
I have wracked my brains,
explored every option.
If I could, I would move
Heaven and Earth to find you
a cure. But, alas, I cannot.
I am not God. I am only
a poor human being.
And so I must let you go.
I commend you to the angels,
to your friends and family,
To the hospice caretakers.
I wish you the best on this
your last journey the one that,
sooner or later, we all face.
I have failed you. forgive me.