(25 comments) SHARE        Saturday, November 22, 2014
Mourning John F. Kennedy and a Half-Century of Degraded Arts and Culture Kennedy looked beyond the "dust of centuries" to ponder America's "contribution to the human spirit." What other American president or elected (sanctioned!) political leader has conjoined the past titans of public life... with those who strode beside them to sculpt, paint and script the Age? More than our "Commander-in Chief," he ascribed to himself the greater role of Teacher-in-Chief.

(7 comments) SHARE        Friday, September 26, 2014
Ten Reasons Why I Refuse To Be Poet Laureate of The United States The title pretty much sums it up. Further, What makes a poem a poem? What is the role of the Artist, the Arts, in a world as violent, mad, fraudulent and topsy-turvy as ours today?

(1 comments) SHARE        Friday, September 12, 2014
Obama Explains Why We Need More War This poem gives a better explanation than the one Obama spewed forth in his address to the nation on 9/10/14!

(7 comments) SHARE        Monday, September 8, 2014
Our Decadent Mainstream Media Proves Stalin Was Right! It has been about 40 years since I found Joan Rivers somewhat amusing. How in hell does the news of her passing take priority over the lives and concerns of millions of working Americans? Didn't there used to be a separation between "real" news and sports and entertainment? And, if they had to share a format at all, wasn't the trivia shuffled to the bottom, put on the back burner, until serious people could prioritize?

(13 comments) SHARE        Saturday, September 6, 2014
Beginning With A Line From Neruda "Why bring us into this pinwheel of sorrows?/ Wasn't it better not to be born?" I cannot answer these questions here--questions, I suppose, not uncommon for too many in our frenetic and hyper-troubled world. I can, perhaps, delineate some factors that prompt such questions--hoping thereby to enhance a sense of kindredship, unity and empathy in the human family.

(12 comments) SHARE        Friday, August 29, 2014
They Tell Me Not To Spell Out "Sh*t"! "Once, scholars quibbled over pins: / How many angels rubbed their shins/ Together on a pointy head?" In militarized America, we are happy to talk about "war" and blood and gore, but find street talk about human functions a mite offensive. We proclaim our ugliness to the world thru our language and imagery, but get hoity-toity over certain proscribed words. Bob Dylan wrote: "The hour is late. Let's speak plainly now."

(8 comments) SHARE        Sunday, August 24, 2014
Rats (a poem) Is human nature degenerating? Have we always been this bad--so mendacious, so violent? Who are we, and what are we becoming?

(9 comments) SHARE        Thursday, August 21, 2014
Crossing Swords in Ferguson, Gaza, Egypt..., and the Unifying Principle of Respect Dear Mother Earth, I am writing you directly because I believe only the Great Soul of our Home can understand where we are now--lost among the stars.

(3 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Slaughter (a poem) "When will they ever learn?" Pete Seeger sang. One of the great problems with learning anything nowadays is who is doing the teaching! Media squawks at us constantly. If we can't cut the strings... we are doomed.

(10 comments) SHARE        Monday, August 11, 2014
"USreal: the Democracidal Minotaur in the Cesspool of Imagination" "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength," Orwell told us in "1984." All oxymoronically true and sad in our twisted world today. But, perhaps the greatest truth that prophet propounded was this: Whoever controls the information controls the imagination.

(3 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, July 22, 2014
We Are The Palestinians No man is an island, John Donne wrote 4 centuries ago. Every man's death diminishes me, he wrote. And we add now--every woman's death, every child's. We are all connected--more so now in our Internet Age than ever. Those people with ancient roots in their land must be cherished. No people have a "God-given" or self-proclaimed right to abuse others. Learn from the past, learn from others to move to a higher consciousness.

(4 comments) SHARE        Monday, July 14, 2014
The "Peace Process" Dies Again There is no "peace process."/ There is peace and the absence of peace--/ The gnawing hunger for it,/ The desperation of the vanquished.

(28 comments) SHARE        Saturday, July 5, 2014
Whitman Recidivist Another 4th of July! But what exactly are we celebrating? All this Bernaysian chanting in the herd: "USA! USA! USA!" How would a true revolutionary like a Whitman perceive our pathetic yawp?

(3 comments) SHARE        Monday, June 23, 2014
A Conversation with Henry David Thoreau I knew who he was, though the garments were the homespun style of 150 years ago. The voice was calm and reassuring--emitted from a sparsely whisker-fringed face, crowned with somewhat unruly hair. A long, thin nose, like the prow (not the rudder) of a boat parted expressive eyes--the left slightly larger, looking straight at one (or upon whatever it focused) while the right looked slightly right and downward and within.

SHARE        Tuesday, June 3, 2014
"A Conversation with Paul Craig Roberts: Transitions; Morals; Alliances and Dissolutions This article will provoke some, annoy others. But, it will make people think. Agree or disagree with him, Paul Craig Roberts has a powerful mind... and it's important that all of us who seek positive change in this world understand where a man like Roberts construes the world, what he has learned from his experiences at and near the pinnacles of power. He's also an informed, scintillating, no-BS conversationalist.

(2 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, May 20, 2014
"Bring Back Our Girls!" Can we get beyond the headlines, beyond our culture of distractions? All over our world today, children are abducted, sold into virtual and real slavery, their labor exploited. They are sexploited by pimps in the poor world and the rich world. We focus attention on a single incident--a missing airliner, a capsized ferry, 200 Nigerian children kidnapped. And then we move on to the next event. We need greater perspective.

(15 comments) SHARE        Saturday, May 10, 2014
"Disentangling Ukraine from Our 'Narrative Lines': a Zen Moment for Our Droned Psyches!" "Zen demands intelligence and will-power," Carl Jung wrote, "as do all the greater things which desire to become real." In America today, we seem to have lost that vital connection--the symbiosis of "intelligence and will-power." There are intelligent people who lack the "will power" to assert themselves, to assert truth as they understand it; and there are many fools with all too much "will-power" to assert their folly!

(3 comments) SHARE        Thursday, May 1, 2014
Kathy Kelly's Challenge: Witness, Courage, Compassion, Becoming There is much that we can't forget in this book; a book about all of us. Kathy Kelly makes us think, makes us confront ourselves. Can we become better than we are? What have we done to create such a dispiriting world? What have we done to relieve suffering, "to act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God"? Kelly is probing basic questions about the meaning of life. This is our mirror now.

(9 comments) SHARE        Saturday, April 19, 2014
The Rise of Our Dumbocracy (A Review of Paul Craig Roberts' "How America Was Lost") Roberts' newest book (463 pages, from Clarity Press, 2014) is a compendium of 135 columns... written between August, 2008 and December 31, 2013.... PCR is simply one of America's best chroniclers of this sad, brutal era of imperial overreach and moral decline. Anyone who wants to understand where we've been... where we are... and where we're heading, had better read this book pronto!

(1 comments) SHARE        Monday, April 7, 2014
Socrates Rebukes the NSA We live in a Surveillance State--the most intense, the most far-reaching and pervasive in the history of the world. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Hitler, Stalin--none of them could have imagined a state as technologically advanced as ours--nor one as hideously distorted. How have "leaders" throughout time cultivated fear of others--xenophobia, etc.--to control their subjects even so they act against their own best interests?