Society sells beautiful lies,
Emphasis on the beautiful,
They sell you the definition of beauty in
small pictures,
small ads,
small sizes.
Spinning the world on a string,
They've got us all fooled.
Telling teens they don't need to eat,
"Skip the food today,
be beautiful tomorrow".
Selling the idea that beauty can replace sorrows.
Society sells the idea that beauty is empowerment.
Society sells the idea that if you are beautiful,
then you could have the world on a string.
These lies lead our leaders of tomorrow into disarray.
Sell us the idea that if we are beautiful
today will be better than yesterday.
But the empty promises lead us all astray,
Abandoned on street corners begging for scraps,
because we didn't think we felt empowerment.

Society sells small,
Society sells beauty,
Society sells small.
Small models,
Small manikins,
Small sizes.
Spinning the world on a string,
Society sells the idea that the size of your waist,
defines how beautiful you are.
Society sells the idea that beauty
is empowerment.
Society sells small.
Society sells the idea that if you are not small,
you are not empowered,
ugly,
waste of space.
Society sells small.
Society says beauty is empowerment.
These lies lead our leaders of tomorrow into disarray,
Too many teens today are to prone to facings their problems with razor blades,
Because today was not better than yesterday.
Then tomorrow won't be either.

Society sells small,
small pictures,
small ads,
small manikins.
Society sells protruding plastic ribs,
ribs sharp enough to cut paper.
Society sells the figures of the sick and dying.

Society sells small.
Small enough to be drop dead gorgeous,
Emphasis on the drop dead,
Society sells women who are severely underfed.
Society sells women suffering from malnutrition.
Since when did this become tradition?
Since when was fragile stature empowering?
Society sells skin and bones.
Society sells so small,
**women are literally dying to feel beautiful.

Cowardice and bravery
Not either/or
But different levels of…

Valor and shame
A swinging door
Whose facings change when swung

A foil to confound
The poets dream
With glory and disdain

Bravery and cowardice
Not zero-sum
—but often look the same

(Villanova Pennsylvania: May, 2016)

Snow started falling sometime late last night.
By the time we awoke, everything was covered
  in a layer thin and pristine white,
and snow was still drifting, it was dancing on down,
  glittering in the early morning light.

"It's pretty outside," she said,
  and I looked
at this picturesque scene pulled straight from a book,
  although probably not a book many have bothered to read.
  
I saw fractal snowflakes, bursting and bold,
  spinning their self-similar sides in the cold.
Though, it behooves me to say...
Not fractal in the formal sense,
  not like Cantor's middle thirds,
   nor that box of Peano's,
    and despite being apropos,
  nothing at all like curve of Van Koch's,
  nicknamed "snowflake" by some.

I saw a vector field of at least four dimensions,
temperature could make five,
or if you prefer, seven.
  Another three -- maybe two -- if directional facings of snowflakes
   are somehow important.
But that's harder to see
  this early in the morning.

I thought about assigning each snowflake a color
and tracing the paths that each one would take,
  to watch them unfurl like ten thousand dancers' ribbons,
  outlining a dedicated jogger's wake
   before tumbling to the ground to rest
   along some stable manifold.

Better yet, I wondered if this field could be reversed,
if I could follow each flake back up to the clouds,
  to find conditions under which
   two that start so close could drift so far apart,
   or how a pair that began so differently could find themselves so close,
   sipping their coffee before it gets cold.

What was it she had said..?
"It's pretty outside."
I looked.
"I think so, too."

Cowardice and bravery
Not either-or
But different levels of

Valor and shame
A swinging door
Whose facings change when swung

A foil to confound
The Poets dream
With glory and disdain

Bravery and cowardice
Not zero-sum
  —but often look the same

(Villanova Pennsylvania: May, 2016)