“Doctor, oh, former professor of
psychology of mine, I see from

the e-mail list that you receive
these vile, reprehensible jokes.

Don’t they bother you?” “Ap-
parently, about as much as they

bother you, my son. You have to
know when to object and when

to let it go. My objections would
mean nothing and so I let him

send me those obscene jokes in
the hope that at some point in

time he would know that while
I love him, I just tolerate and

hate his hate. It’s what I do.
Perhaps you have a better

approach.” “I’ll think about
it.”

Tina shopped like crazy —
bags and bags and bags
all dragged from the store
and dumped unceremoniously
in the trunk of the cab.
Please, please, Tina, tell
us your conspicuous con-
sumption is just a Saturday
Night Live shtick, but it
isn’t, is it? It’s a com-
mercial and you are headed
to the bank. But you are
from SNL and perhaps before
that Second City and you
poke fun at the foibles of
all, and all of you stand
for truth, justice, mercy
and peace except that you
don’t…really. Really, you
just stand for acting, enter-
tainment and commercials,
yes, commercials paid for
by that great vote-buying
money machine — corporate
America and, for some reason,
that seems so sad. Somebody
has to make fun of the phon-
ies. Does it take phonies
to do that or just writers
and actors with great masks
and who am I to judge, but
still, still we want our
truth-tellers wrapped in
a punchline like the court
jester — just to keep the
king honest.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall….”
Something there is that loves a bridge.
Perhaps, the fundamentalists here and
there can be moved just a smidge
to accommodate the vast majority
who march that bridge
for social justice and equality.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall….”
Something there is that loves a bridge.

Light and heat do meet
on the black topped street of life
penetrating through
the head to feet through the shoe
on the sidewalk walk to you.

Japanese Tankas
are poems consisting of five
lines of thirty-one syll-
ables completing moods through
use of metaphors and images.

That definition
had the five lines of thirty-one
syllables in the
following order: 5,7,
5,7,7 as do these lines.

However, Tanka
Plus poems I make up consist
of seven lines of
a full forty-three syllab-
les in the order
of 5,7,5,7,5,7,
7 without a metaphor.

The college girls are
so full of themselves, nubile.
They splash in the pool.
They take so many selfies.
For breakfast they dress
like they are going to dance
while an old man dumpster dives.

Heading west on I-10 so far out
of Phoenix that the only stations
available are religious, always
evangelical, fundamentalist Christ-
ians who can’t stop hearing them-
selves talk, he hears the preacher
quip, “The road of life is bumpy,
but Jesus is the shock absorber.”
Clever, he thinks. The road to
Palm Springs had its bumps all
right including the corny preachers
on the ubiquitous religious radio
stations in the middle of nowhere
when nothing else comes in. He
then understood the heat of hell
and thought to himself, I have
to remember to bring along some
CD’s of classical music or maybe
just an old tape of Henny Youngman
quipping some joke that wouldn’t fly
today like, “My wife and I love to
go out to eat. I go on Tuesday and
she goes on Thursday.”

The sun starts to set.
He watches the mountain peaks
turn orange to purple
to black to gone. Lights come on
in the pool and spa.
Some forget to pull the drape
and make love behind the sheer.

The Franciscan wrote of
starting small and working
up the chain
from a stone
to the “gaze divine,”
and back down again
in time.

He thought about his
life — up, down, high, low,
in and out
and all about —

stones, gaze, gaze, stones;
it all seems divine,
even that rattlesnake,
there, just ahead
on the right under
the scrawny, scrub
pine.

Be alert! Stop before
a burning bush
and gaze
into the divine.
The same goes
for what’s
under that
scrawny, scrub
pine.

He went for a jog
from the concrete and blacktop,
to the desert trails.
His spirit began to soar
until he spotted
a rattlesnake on the path
and he felt his heart beat fast.