executive orders

stop eating animals.

but I love lamb and it's the worst,

those delectable little lamb ribs flying onto my plate

all the way from the verdant hills of New Zealand.

that juicy hamburger topped with dijon mustard

lettuce and tomatoes.

do we have to

follow this executive order to stop eating animals

can we skirt the rules, eat pork chops while

hiding behind a magazine on a fast moving 

subway, is there another way.

we don't need no educashen

we don't need no educashen, Betsy,
we don't need no fancy cars
we don't need no billionaires
betsy, just leave us all alone in our
deteriorating slums, our decrepit classrooms,
we don't need no extra pencils,
we don't need no extra books,
betsy, just leave us all alone, we can find
our way alone
betsy, walk the primrose path with the whites
and the wealthy, help them with their applications
to the ivys, Betsy,
just leave us all alone.

a productive day accomplishing nothing

yes. interested. want to work work this.
fast electrons generating corona discharge in a laser cavity
while flying over the SAA.
yes, project started
contamination modeling for the UV instrument
heading to Europa.
yes.
we need to do those electrical conductivity measurements
from liquid nitrogen temps up to 150C
Check,
yes.
Get B going on the vacuum chamber measurements
and better write that procedure, get those masks
machined and finish up
finish up but I have hardly started
it was a productive day but no experiment
was done, no models were run, no
papers written.
most satisfying accomplishment,
getting Karen to myself for a coffee.

an absence of flute

a sick father-in-law in Houston
a sister-in-law in labor
taking care of a son.
those are his reasons.

for me,
a daughter and her love
over for wine and cheese
another birthday celebration,
the end of the 50s,
I hadn't really realized that.

darkness and its late
hot milk ready to culture
dirty dishes and unpacked suitcases.

tomorrow is Monday
much to be done

flute will take a back seat
my warm bed calls me.

Tracks in the snow

emerging from the fog below

every tree shrouded in white

the ice chilled me.

sun now and blue sky,

we are rolling down hill now, 

we break on rocks or find our way around,

we may roll to a stop at a snowbank 

our tracks may be uneven or unsure

some of us will gather speed on a downhill

forming a path for others

I saw all this on the mountain under

sunshine and blue sky

the world was beautiful

we are all beautiful.

Calculating at night

I'm cold and it's dark outside.
I missed the political rally at the Rayback
standing room only.
Running SindaFluint models for purge flow
into a spectrometer to keep the dew point
less than 8C.
how many people care about that
until they understand that calculation means
they can look forward to views out into the
heavens one day.
Some would care.
Trump wouldn't.
I do.

the airport

behind every concession counter is a black woman,
an Hispanic woman, a person
of color, size, accent different from me.
every TSA kiosk, a black man,
the janitors are black or Hispanic,
the kind people who wheel old people through
the airport, all different colored than me.

every seat on the airplane is filled with
white people, every bar filled with
white people.
at work, almost every engineer and scientist,
every technician seems to be white,
a few Asians, a few well educated rooted in other cultures.
there are few that look different from me.
in the meeting today, there were white people
in a white room with beautiful mountains in the background.

I want a rainbow of colors and sizes
in my life, at my work, in my neighborhood.
I will pull her from behind the counter
and ask her to walk with me to the
bar for a drink.
She will never go back.