He says that Jesus taught us to
be obedient to two masters
and to serve the heads of state
wherever they are leading

Serving under arms when called
to kill foreigners on foreign soil
who worship God a different way
A cross all Christians carry

But to speak up respectfully
when the church says God’s law is higher
like when babies are aborted
or homosexuals marry

bombus alights on
morning glory, blossoming
above rotting trash

the vines extend their
tentacles upward, fighting
to pull down phone lines

the purple trumpets
sound a silent clarion
for reinforcements

the untamed backyard
grasses respond to the call,
overthrowing the fence

somewhere, a mower
rusts in the shadows while birds
and vermin rejoice.

It cannot be swept
out the back door with a broom
or under the couch

Like crushed glass it cuts
from hidden floor crevices
long after breakage

The displaced pigeons
and the vagabond sparrows
sulk among snowflakes

daffodils ignore
winter's last futile flurry;
they stretch and awake

I want a few quiet minutes
but tractor trailers and buses won't yield their time
A white Monte Carlo rolls by, music blasting
low-rider pickups and teenage foot-draggers

Back stoop, daughter's in bed
the full moon shines like a police chopper spotlight
neighbor's windows flicker with TV light like bug-zappers
something rustles in the leaves

Back in my daughter's room
banishing monsters with my guitar
the quiet is within the chords
the strings create solitude

Front porch, November night
my Washburn blocks the woman cursing at her dog
the chuckleheads wandering the streets
Chords as a prayer, a rosary for stillness

The sky is grey at eight a.m.
tinting memories of Saturday's sun
with a mask of autumnal finality
I hate Standard Time.

But there's nothing as beautiful
as a child on a leaf-strewn trail
beneath a canopy of maroon and gold
with holes of cold, crisp blue

And there's nothing quite as sweet
as grabbing that moment of mortality
It's fall, it's harvest time
and you're reaping the fruits of summer memory

Asterisk Boy's got an itchy trigger finger/
He's a fat-cats-first-kill-the-rest right winger/
God made him king so he knows he's right/
He never lets his people stay away from a fight/

He tells a lie until he thinks it's true/
Asterisk Boy knows what to do/
he'll lock up anyone who gets in his way/
The voice in his ears tells him what to say/

Four more years of a nasty habit/
He's not going to let anybody else have it/
The money pours in from the corporate coffers/
Blood and profits is what he offers/

I've got the asterisk blues/
I can't win I can only lose/
It's treason they say/
to protest in this way/
I've got the asterisk blues…

Mist clings to the ground
a comforter for the earth
against morning's cold

Amber morning light
shattered factory windows gleam
like chapel stained glass

Onion domed churches
and sardine-stacked rowhouse streets
slide by silently

“Express” commuter rail
mysteries lurk in the fog
we creep around turns

Bursts of blue skies
lined
with gods-whisker golden clouds
cirrus morning shadow

Dense scrub forests
islands in suburban sprawl

pass, invisible

Morning light turns hard

watercolor mists retreat

unforgiving day

Jersey office parks
Metropark megaliths
among plastic trees

Rahway's flat rooftops
mirror the slate shine from
the
refinery clouds

Newark Airport spews
another pumpkinseed plane

into dawn's visage

Burning rubber smell
acrid as a tire dump fire
Welcome to Newark

It's a winter sun
on an early fall morning

urban grit sky

Bricks, steel and shambles
line the New Jersey railroad
vacant lots steaming

Newsprint-colored sky
brown, black, traffic-cone orange
graffiti relief

Post industrial
landscape reflects in the Kill

ducks, egrets, phone poles

Cargo cranes, gantries
gather in Meadowlands mist
conspiring, waiting

Then down below ground

below the Hudson, into
Manhattan's bowels

Up from the darkness
disgorged into the station
the rush for fresh air

Oh, screw the cab line

I'll walk across Manhattan
I'm travelling light.

[headline haiku / dot-communist]

A pair of longtime friends, J. and R., had dropped off our radar screen for a few months; we knew they were having problems with their teenage daughter, so we left occasional messages offering our support. Then, during the summer, we heard from J, — she and R. were breaking up because R. had been involved in an affair–a homosexual affair.

Yesterday, another one of our friends confided that she was asking her significant other to leave because of his drinking problem. The problem was obvious; we had recently had dinner with them, and he was drunk when we arrived. It was also long-lived; he had a history, but on the surface it had seemed he was making good on promises. Then he quit his job, and all pretense of control was gone.

And then, another couple we know that is in the middle of relocating seemed to come a bit unglued. She left town suddenly, to go to their new house, already bought, leaving him with the kids ; he had to drop them with a neighbor because of work.

Meanwhile, a couple we know from church and our kids' school has been seperated for months; we only found out this week when the rigors of the new school year and soccer practice tore away the illusion of normalcy they had been painting for all but those closely involved.

I am no stranger to this. I've been in an untenable relationship, that I stayed in because I felt obliged to by honor and faith and only left when it was clear that it was necessary to preserve the health of my sons and myself. I count myself more fortunate every day that I did, and that I found a relationship and a marriage that work in the wake of that disaster.

But there are always strains placed on relationships from the outside that challenge. If you're lucky, and patient, and prepared, you can get through many of them. But for some, as Yeats said, “Things fall apart; the center will not hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The artifices that people build to deal with daily life, to plaster over differences rather than communicate about them, inevitably collapse under their own weight.

Sometimes, the collapse is a good thing-it forces change that is necessary, and clears the air for things to be rebuilt more strongly. But often, the crisis that brings on the collapse is too much to get beyond to make repairs; the resolve to make things right is washed away in the emotion of the moment, and all that remains is the jagged hole.

Yet
it is a day cluttered with the remnants of another day two years ago.
And somehow, taking joy in the gift of this day seems like snatching
candy from the bowl while your parents' backs are turned.

But
why? The sorrow is there, clearly, but can we not feel joy and sorrow
at the same time? Can we not learn new lessons from this day rather
than rehash that which has past?

Today is a day that should
remind us to live our lives, rather than relive them. In looking
backward, we should look forward. How can we change the world for the
better from this moment forward? How can we accept what we cannot
change and make the best of it?

We mark a loss today, a
punctuation mark in our personal histories. But it is a comma, not a
period. We remake the world every day; let's remember how those we've
lost would want the world to be as we move to remake it better.

Frequent rejections
and handling the unhappy–
“more pay would be nice”

Perhaps there's a job
soliciting support for
Republican pols

Host or parasite?
Fifty dollars a month for
dialup and heartache

For this, and dial-up access from the road, I've been paying $50 a month.

So, the time has come to completely pull the plug. I just redirected my domains to a new domain name server at my bargain-basement hosting service, where my disk quota is larger by more than a factor of 10 and my hosting bill is $8 a month. I will no longer suffer in the name of supporting locals. As soon as the DNS refreshes, my move of all my weblogs (except for the one hosted by Userland) will be complete.

Celebratory
small arms fire around Baghdad
Saddam has no heirs.

A slap to the face
back to reality
winter's not dead yet
and never quite gone

spring snow
tops off the resevoir
melts into topsoil
softens the earth

cold mother
of summer's abundance
harsh midwife
of creation's rebirth

spring snow
sharpens the senses
teaches us patience
tempers our hope

Hong Kong apartment
under 10-day quarantine
but SARS goes global

all punctuation
and interjections of blood
the meter of death

elegies follow
but expletives fill the now
anger, hate and steel.

Meanwhile, more insult
Israel gets ten billion
in financial aid

Maybe a little
attack on North Korea
will cure his ennui.

America on the top,
a “first among equals”
The world under our boot-
-
a Pax Romana sequel
called “America first.”

Or some other road less traveled
by the combat boot's sole
A shared security
A lesser role
on a road that may be harder

than one on which
we give all directions
but one where corporate interests
are tempered by dissention
and people come first.

It's not about Iraq
Saddam or the bomb
It's about McDonalds
versus the Imam
lucre or culture

Unilatateral Empire or
global democracy
“Liberating Iraq”?
Complete hypocrisy
Liberation by vulture.

Now government bumbles with consequence
and tech sector, humbled, feigns irrelevance
and our rights are for sale for p.a.c. cash
or taken away for our safety.

But certainly, words
are massing on the border
prepared for attack

Sometimes life alone
is cause for celebration
when death lurks nearby

Who values life more:
a rush-hour sniper or the
righteous war wager?

Death at discount
It's cheaper by the millions
than one at a time

Blood spilled far away
makes for better tv than
death on your doorstep

Who can be “pro-life”
that prepares to cause the death
of scores of children?

Ridge… encouraged parents to talk to their children about September 11 and “the possibility that those who would do us harm may choose that date … to do us harm again.”

He and his bosses
at Salomon Smith Barney
face charges, then some.

Poor, poor Jack Grubman
The U.S. Attorney thinks
Jack's career is done.

The lesson (for some):
Never rate stocks as “strong buy”
so bonuses come.

Alan Greenspan speaks:/
Everything is looking up!/
(except white collar crime)

How do you know when/
Dubya will jitter market?/
Easy-his lips move.

A bomb and gunmen/
kill seven on the West Bank;/
Israeli settlers.

Nextel posts profit?/
wireless carrier in black/
while wired ones in red.

Elliot Spitzer,/
bane of Wall Street analysts/
stalks Jack Grubman now.

Grubman told Congress/
“I call them as I see them.”
Does he need glasses?