Crazy how the new got old so quick
Drug dealing is the new entrepreneurship
Stripping is the new night shift
**** financial aid ****
Since they finish college but continue dancing
On that ***** pole ****
Gay is the new straight
Killer cops are the new superman
And cop killers the new batman
Since when have black lives matter
That's old news ****
Social media fame is the new news feed
And gangster rap beef is the new comedy
Kevin Heart is the new Bill without the pill
Obama is the new Kennedy not John but Robert
Hillary will be the new President
But that's just my prediction
Even-though 49 percent of me believes a Republican is winning this election
Since they are the new donkeys and Democrats the new elephant
Orange is the new black?
.... wait...
Orange is the new black?
That's a thing of the past orange been the color for Blacks
Poets are the new rappers
Rappers are the new fathers
**** is the new medicine
No need for doctors and nurses
Money is the new God
Gold chains are the new nooses
Since every ***** want one
D'usse is the new Hennessey no need for a chase
So much new in the world but I'm still the same ol' me
Cole is the new Nas
Kendrick is the new Em
"Drake is the new great Philosopher"
But that is in the words of the Bronx borough president
Since he is the new ***** of politics
But there's only still one
Jay-z
Ball is the new life
and hoes are the new wife's
Snitches are the new thugs
K2 is the new ****
Heroine the new *******
Pills the new crack
So much new in the world and I'm still the same ol' me
Black will be the new white
Peace will be the new war
But those are just my predictions
Since we lost our self-identity through the modern age of seasoning
So much new in the world as I predict
I'll stay the same
While the environment adapts to me
never the other way around
I'll forever be me
And these voices in my head are just the curse of the talented

As air and leaf litter are substrate for the bird.
And what makes a human. Separation from the substrate.
Believing the substrate and the subject are separately defined.

Whatever gives the poem form - three lines - is the substrate.
Things will be said. The signer and the seer must supply the words
Which are the substrate of the mind. A beautiful week ahead.

No hundred year storms, normal summer warming.
Your bones are white as lightning and strong as sticks and stones.
At Pat's 80th b'day party most of us are old and jolly.

250,000 port-o-potties. There's a way to wash one out
And a way not to. Arctic ice melt. Slushies. One can count
Past one or nine by inserting zero to keep the rows.

Implied is an order beyond the small order we impose.
Goes to greatness human and divine. The two white wines
Death brings to the garden are the love between good friends -

Abstract. Suppose there is no afterlife, to understand the end
Imagine the beginning - no brain, no mind, no name, no I. Zero
Had already been inflated and the rose was in the garden.

Appointment to have ***** removed by robot-assisted surgeon.
Air-conditioned, no mosquitoes in the OR. When you arrive
You'll remove all your clothes. Naked before the ladies, nurses
Who have seen it all before. Mainly remember you're not unique.
Think about the government while they're mixing up the medicine.
There's always governance even if there's little or no government.
Back to counting backwards. Inside out, if I die, will I know it?

At 70, Jack's running the gauntlet with some skill!
Benny Golson wonders aloud what might have been
Had Clifford Brown not been killed in that auto accident.
Jack's girlfriend once said he was the reincarnation of Clifford
But he doesn't believe in ghosts, karma or an afterlife.
Benny's old girlfriend Betty inspired the tune Along Came Betty
And that's the most afterlife Benny or Betty's gonna get.

The Trojan bench being not as deep as the Greek
Once Sarpedon and Hector go down even the lucky shot
To Achilles' feet is not enough to save the town.
Aeneas is no match for wily Odysseus
Although unbeknownst to all he has the last laugh when Rome
Conquers Athens, the Myrmidons, what's left of Ilion
And the whole known world from India to Britain.

It's not bad to acknowledge death's primacy
Although after a while you stop remembering
To fear. That's when everything becomes clear
Purpose v. purposelessness matters less,
Anomie v. rule of law, that's a preference
Love v. loneliness, worth about 25 cents
Or a million bucks in the light of the holocaust.

Nothing but light, love and the majesty of death in the room.
Machines stand ready like marines, their beauty is in the motion
That overcomes inertia. The food supply is deeply compromised
So eat whatever you want. Mourning the dead is part of the business
Of healing and staying alive. When you get to the afterlife, walk with
      eyes open,
Ocotillo and cactus may be in flower. The robot does the work,
      imposes
Its own small order, like a ******* a bicycle with disorder in her hair.

Financiers feel superior to farmers
and pundits have it over poets.
All to the good because if you think America's
doing just fine, don't skip to the poetry reviews.
Our enemies are barbarous, our allies duplicitous
but our smart bombs are smart - that's how they found you.

Dad said all wars are resource wars. Follow
the money. The world needs more order, nothing
less than Nazis, never may the anarchic man's thoughts
be my thoughts, each shove sends a ping,
shields urge on shields, helmets helmets, we can be
the reigning kings between the last empire and the next

or implement a vision of collective deliberation
and binding agreements. Can China's navy
be harnessed to ensure free passage through
the South China Sea? We'll see how
things work out in the next generation.
In the meantime should I read Henry Kissinger's meditations?

He who thinks poetry's effete
probably considers Darwin a geek and Einstein
a postal clerk. Containment means leaving space
for the passionate and zealous to face themselves
and giving them missiles that don't work.
Slowing everyone down until one thing's done well -

governance or sustenance or brotherhood.
When violence comes to the neighborhood
the hierarchy will hold or fold, it is then the peace work proves
      relevant.
Failing to achieve understanding, we're searching outer space
for an entity to unite us as humanity.
That person, or city, is consciousness.

By that what is meant. Sitting still and thinking deeply
on the relation of anger to coercion,
systems for correcting the decisions of earlier presidents.
We're required to report incidents of depression
to a doctor because you're a valued member of of our community,
or so insignificant no one notices or cares.

How necessary the interface of war and poetry!

Generally cheerful institutions
school and hospital, The Constitution,
roadways with their yellow stitch lines.

Order on the mountainside, in the city,
the veneer is thin, the people thrifty,
the freedom to associate unlimited.

Smoke the cigarette, sound the subwoofer,
I woof and bay like every other dog, proof
one cannot escape the planet, life's foolproof.

Magic's secret- rabbit, lion- the inner
animus emerges from the hat. One eats magicians,
the other's skewered for dinner.

Thus, happy and sad at once, death a solace
and a fearsome fright. As the dashed lines pass,
confidently, and when necessary, I drive fast.

An afternoon, one hundred years of solitude
for our silver maple. Microscopic magnitudes:
the snake's skin, the fly's wing, the man's mood.

Spring. Same plants, same order.
Monday morning, open for business.
Tractor-trailers, day care centers.
Every leaf that’s coming out is out.

To tonight’s town meeting I will go unaware and foolish.
It’s delicious, the unimportance of my feelings.
Even our particular war was small.
Europe had one last a century.

Hubble photos of events 13 billion years ago
Do not put me in mind of the species’ insignificance.
Just the opposite having witnessed the universe’s birth.
But birth from what preceding state? God again rears his hoary head.

They say one must let go and will let go,
God will decide what tragedy you need.
Not every seed becomes a flower,
Not every branch breaks out like a prosthetic trombone.

While the ancient Romans wrote of love
The ancient Britons wrote of war.
The Romans should have been perfecting their republic.
No god could do that work for them.

The November moth's the fall cankerworm--Alsophilia pometaria--
Slender-bodied, beige, beginning life as the well known inchworm.
In our war more children may have died than would have had
      the tyrant lived in fear and awe.
We can never know because we conquered.

Organization man. In the best sense
creating the environment in which experiments
can be savored and remembered.

Then there is the world of interlocked
organizations. A world of missions and contracts
finely tuned and binding.

Is the formation of associations
as instinctual as nesting and gestation?
A leader may be one who asks a question.

Or may be one imposing order.
Imposed through consensus and broad shoulders.
Waits, watches, acts his part.

I was impressed by the list of distinguished senators
from Vermont. He placed himself among men,
orators, imperfect, in history.

We march forward, imperfect in our justice
and compassion. Overriding logic with conscience
sometimes, not often, when it counts.

And mercy. A seemingly irrational, total
abnegation of the markets, rules of war, law.
Good to be so flawed.

In "The Shootist", J.B. Books is not feeling up to *****.
He has cancer. What are the concerns
of a man dying.

To die
commensurate with the way he lived his life.
Books dies in a gunfight.
McIntosh dies in the desert, under a broken wagon,
fighting Indians.
Norman Thayer will die of heart failure
by the side of his wife, Ethel.

Two police officers
die investigating a stolen moped at a gas station
in the Bronx.
One buys it between the eyes, the other in the back.
The killer out on early parole
from a manslaughter rap.
The DA blames the judge, the judge blames the parole board,
and the board says the jails are overcrowded.

What should I be doing, old turtle.
Devote myself to re-order the world
or crawl off to a lonely spot and preserve myself.
We are trying
to educate everyone to their individual capacities
and see that all are fed, clothed and sheltered adequately.
Because the suffering of one citizen makes suffering
for another, the slow death of one sometimes makes
the sudden ****** of another.

There is this
black rock we live on and its lovely mantle of green.
It is all that is perfect. And everything of it is
perfect that respects its integrity. On the subway
I was amused to find, hidden in the confused
mass of anonymous, bleak graffiti, unseen
by the studied, expressionless passengers,
in pink, delicate script, vertically written,
the word *****.

People are the element I live in.
The world is pushy, we are bone,
the numbers of us overwhelm.
It is going to be hot again soon
and the Bronx will actively resent it.

Books dies in Carson City,
only two or three people will miss him at all.
He died alone as he lived,
with his enemies.

I wonder if the answer is in the formulas and theorems that the world has held since the beginning of time
If the limit approaches Gods thrown on high
The limit does not exist for His love of man kind

And I've wondered how deep the oceans are,
does it have any correlation to the peace in Your heart?
Divers found coral 10,000 years old,
That's only a fraction of the value for the love you have for me, I'm told

And speaking of value, if I could continue,
Thank you for her kindness
And my mothers strength
And my brothers keen mind
I've wondered what it's like to clay and craft
And how You could create so much beauty
In each and every person, from first to last,

They say you're the first and the last,
And God I never stopped wondering,
How you knew the moment that I would choose to be my last,
And why you chose to save my life when you knew I had no interest in making you my master
And why the years have gotten better but now time only goes faster and faster

When the sparkle and gleam fades from my eyes
Because my neurons don't fire quite right
And my burdens have taken their toll,
Remember I wouldn't walk so heavy if my head wasn't a fight
And my father left a permanent scar on my heart
I know he didn't mean it but he tore our family apart
God, did you know this would all happen from the very start?
My favorite lines for 8 years have been What can I do? How can I help?
But now it's just, How do I play this part?

Love me gentle love me kind
Love me love me make me remember
Love me love me make me pure of mind

My psychiatrist told me when I was 11 years old  my serotonin levels were too low
Okay, I understand my neurons don't fire quite right
I'll take my medicine. I know, I'll be alright,
But then doctor why am I kept up at night?
Why do I explode and turn everything into a fight?
Why can't I see clearly or do what is right?
Will you help me to see
Help me to be me
My strength doesn't run endlessly
Oh God, help me to be