Re@ding

People say they don’t read,
meaning books: thick blocks
of thin printed paper. But
everybody reads everything:
food-labels, traffic signs, manga,
newspapers, computer screens.
Like this one, right now.

(01 FEB 09, Santa Clara CA)v7

Tr@nsporting

I don’t drive; I just walk
to the nearest bustop, ride
to the local train station,
get off at the last station,
switch to the subway, catch
a bus going up-hill, walk
up the street, up the steps,
using the cities' innermost
transportational links.

(01 FEB 09, Santa Clara CA)v9

Blurrring

Thinking, writing & talking blur:
have I already written or spoken
this to you? Havent I sent you this
as an e-mail, or posted it on my blog?
Have you already heard it before?
Can you stand hearing it again?

(30 JAN 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

POETS & OTHERS

Poets & others diss the Inaugural poem
as irrelevant or inequal to the day, but
I like how it doesn’t just make Obama
the ‘mutt’ savior of all colors, races, etc.
Its B-roll takes us down to our daily life
where things are now the election's over.
Can we handle the present’s dire conditions?
Do we have a choice? Yes, & we exercised it.
Now to repair a badly damaged country's
damaging others. If that isn’t enuf for you,
what is? Watch it fade to action; action,
correction; repair, reparations. Not quite
noble enuf for you? Get real.


(22 JAN 09, Santa Clara CA) v6

OVER THE HILL

(with & for Alex)

You drove us down CA 17 & over the hill to Santa Cruz
to walk the pier at sunset to watch
big, brown baggy sea-lions barking underneath it
after we’d stuffed ourselves
at our fave Chinese (Ocean City) buffet,
in our private annual tradition.

On the way back, as you drove The Hill,
I told you that I’ve finally realized the best thing
I’ve ever (co-) created (even as a poet) is: You.

(We should all tell our children this truth.)

Just as I would, you replied:
"You have more poems to write."
True, Alex, but no more sons to have co-made
& marvel at as I do you.

You are my beautiful, blond Apollonian look-alike heir;
my do-alike heir’s your sister, dark Maya, my equally
sexy brunette Dionysian daughter.

Each of us has more to say, sing, prove.

(13 JAN 09, Santa Clara CA ) v7

Threw Shoes?

[for George Perreault]

“So what if he threw shoes?”
says cheekily defiant Dubya,
missing the significance of
a Cairo TV-reporter's throwing
his shoes at him during
a Baghdad press-conference,

one shoe making him lame-duck,
the other, over his head, slamming
into the wall behind him. Throwing
shoes at someone is the worst
possible insult in the Arab world:

shoes cover the body's lowest part,
tread on animal dung, are removed
on entering a house or mosque.
What’s lower? Just the dung itself.

(15 DEC 08, Santa Clara CA)v5

Paper Tiger

In Silicon Valley's Cupertino,
a dutiful grandson eagerly awaits
an annual U.S. Savings Bond

from his indulgent grandfather,
a manufacturer in Shanghai
who shuffles yuans, reading
his falling quarterly orders
report on the United States.

This year his indulgence
will bear the 2-tongued-E
of a Eurobond instead.

Facing the Chinese in Beijing,
Paulson involuntarily shudders
at a hint of chill across the table.

Something’s morphing. Paper’s
no longer just promissory scrip.

(O5 DEC 08, Santa Clara CA)v3