To Leon

Oh dear Leon, you,

tu, who sought a delicate balance

between anarchy and military phalanx,

between democracy and egalité,

among the bolshevoi and the fraternite,

during that treacherous time between the

two War blights,

between interwar contentions of

Social lefts and Fascia rights.

Hey Leon, man of belles lettres,

don't make it bad; just

'take a sad

song, and make it better,'

we would have said,

before republican liberté got shot dead.

Your fined-tuned idea of Man's

path to Justice was so,

oh so, exquisitely

constructed,

until the fierce winds of prewar gahenna

somewhere between Paris and Vienna

overpowered your pure, postwar intentions,

decimated your Front Populaire coalitions,

obliterated, with wehrmacht destruct,

your Social political construct,

when the ancient god of Forces

dispatched his dread iron horses,

to explode your good intentions

and implode your fragile humanité

conventions.

Oh Leon, merci for your short-lived

Premier swan chanson.

Quel est ce bruit lointain

nous entendons?

Oh Leon dear,

what is that distant noise we hear?



CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Insomnibility

When stock market volatility
moves to Feddish liquidility
then market reliability
morphs to questionable credibility.

Every market indicator
every demographic agitprop maker
every talking-head prognosticator
strokes the now rather than the later.

Boomers approach senility
as Xers court sterility
while millennials forfeit ability
to sustain sustainability.

Couch potatoes cultivate disability
while media props up stability;
Detroit portends inability
of longterm viability.

Just give 'em some assurance
of some systemic SS insurance
so they'll feel this crazy occurence
will not exhaust our Yank'ed endurance.

I was born on a postWar morn
before the Viet sheep were shorn,
before the American dream was torn.
Now here I lie forlorn.

Glass Chimera

I gots de Motown blues

I'll never forget the day in 1955 when I, being four years old, leaped into the driver's seat of my dad's brand new Chevrolet station wagon. I was pretending to drive the gleaming whizbang motorcoach as it sat motionless in our GI-bill financed tract-home driveway. The car was a shiny beige color, with a brown top and chrome trim. What a dream, to one day grow up and drive such a machine!

This was in America in 1955. . . America, home of the yanks who had helped our Allies to drive the Nazis back into their German holes, and the Japs back onto their little setting-sun island. America, home of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Wayne, Doris Day, Elvis, Mickey Mouse, Lassie, Howdy Doody, and Chuck Berry. America. . . home of Coca-Cola, Bell Telephone, Lucille Ball, Jackie Robinson, Nat King Cole, Mahalia Jackson. America. . .home of General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, cowboy movies, American Bandstand, Hollywood and freeways. America. . . home of the Corvette, the Mustang, the Rambler. America, home of Motown, Smoky Robinson, Berry Gordy, The Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Aretha, the Four Tops, and Sam Cooke.

America . . . home of the original Motor City of this world, Detroit!

America . . . home of Detroit, now deep in bankruptcy blues?

Aw, g'on! Who'd of thought? Say it ain't so, Joe! Who knew?

This couldn't be the same Detroit I remember, couldn't be the home the Detroit Tigers, Ty Cobb, Al Kaline? Couldn't be the great world-class City that sent that gleaming, du0-toned Chevy machine in 1955 to grace our driveway? The same Detroit that put space-age fins on the 1959 Cadillac? The same Detroit that drove our Chevy on the levee? The same Detroit that built my first car, the hand-me-down from my parents Chevy II wagon, the one that had gear linkage that used to get stuck in second gear so that I had to jump out at the traffic light, open the hood and jerk the gears back into operation before climbing back into the driver seat while motorists behind me had impatient looks on their faces?

Detroit, in bandruptcy? Detroit. . . the high-energy happ'nin City that pumped up our automotive dreams for the better part of a century? That Detroit?. . . that fueled up our mojo since we wuz kneehigh to a Coupe de Ville bumper? Detroit?. . .that epicenter of Motivational gas-powered Motion that enabled our cruisin' to the bebop drive-in for burgers n' shakes on Friday night?

That Detroit? The great Motown that, decade after decade, was kept hummin' by thousands, yeah I say unto thee probably millions, of line workers who were tightening bolts, turning screws, clamping body parts, body-slammin world-record productivity with infinitely sustainable prodigious wonders of automotive virtuosity?

That Detroit? Those workers? Those pensioners who are now left behind wondering What the hell?

That Detroit? now to be rescued from pension failure by Judge Rosemarie Aquilina?

Good luck with that, as we say in Ameica. See ya!

Glass Chimera

Fidelity is the way to go

A man cannot

love all the lovely women of this world.

What's best is to choose

one,

and love her well.

Then she is satisfied, and he is taken care of,

while God is pleased and

society hums along more contentedly.

Oh and btw,

along the way

children are born: this is the real

miracle.

The sacrifice the man makes, being faithful and

fatherly,

becomes a tribute and preserver to his own ongoing

sanity

and the children's

stability. It is a win-win

for everybody.

You see, the man would go crazy trying to love all those beautiful

women out there. Really,

The only way to love all the women of this world is

to love one woman well, and smile at

all those others. Then say to them:

Peace be with you.



Glass half-Full

Mauka/Makai

Where earth has poured out its magma heart
onto ocean's sphere, things begin to happen
differently.
Then stony solidity challenges watery
dominance,
and blocked kinesis thrusts
interference
patterns onto the wavy deep.
'Tis then the great fluid finds its
fury,
and the waves their wobbly wanderings.
'Tis then
the splashy sea find its unsettled voice,
lending boisterous mayhem to the world:
Islands become frontiers of landed life, and
continents become monuments of tectonic
discontent,
and mankind finds itself at home therein.
This is a fair place to spend eternity,
if it were so,
but if not, there is a better world
to which we go.
Don't ask me how I know;
it is the substance of things unseen
to which our faith doth flow.

Glass half-Full

Kai kai Kauai

Surfy shimmer late afternoon slant light
hath revealed glimmering
truth that midday overlooked,
as each wave topples in from aquamarine bliss
blasting gold and magic disappearish foam upon the beach.
Silvery rumpled water plane retreats back to sea
leaving sheen that descends into coarse brownsand,
mottled with micro rivulets crisscrossing intersecting
as multiple mini-sandstorms settle from their infinite mini-maelstroms
upon this shore,
racing, streaking wavelets o'er the smoothness of ancient speckled sands
where sandstonish texture takes over as crystalish water is disappearing
constantly and forever
and ever and amen
according to shapeshifting strand line as erratic as
a dowjones database
Jackie Paper will sail no more on this particular
day
but the sun sets down its golden splashes same as
it always has since
God only knows when.

Glass half-Full

Kauai kai

First is the sunshine, everywhere
bright on this deep Pacific blue; way out there
Puff blows up his silver-whites
and pushes them into distant cumulus piles
onto absolutely flat
horizon.
From there afar sapphire stretches at me
rolling into nearer aquamarine
then clearer azure.
The ocean surfs in, tossing frothy white
o'er brown-gold beach, sloshing
sparkles
everywhere, all the way up
into micro wavelets of universal energy;
they flatten
in sine shadow lines that skitter across the cosine sand.
Eons away from any continent
and far far far from any heckled world
in a land called Hanalei,
Hawaii and Thee
I see.

Glass half-Full