Lessons from Buffett: Running a Business

Buffett, the well-written biography of Warren Buffett by Roger Lowenstein, offers an interesting biographical sketch with several insights into principled business and investing.  In this first reflection I am going to compare Warren Buffett’s management philosophy with that of Charles Koch’s.

While their businesses face a host of different incentives — Berkshire Hathaway a publicly owned company and Koch Industries privately held — their principled approach to business echoes many similarities.

Value Creation

Both Buffett and Koch approach business with an openness to change and with a focus on creating value, wherever they can find it.

“Buffett did not think of Berkshire necessarily as a textile company, but as a corporation whose capital ought to be deployed in the greenest possible pastures.”  As Berkshire’s textile business struggled, Buffett began directing it’s profits into new sectors and opportunities.

Similarly, Koch, initially in the oil refining business, diversified his re-investments in the company into other more value-rich propositions — from commodities trading to fiber.  Koch Industries’ vision does not focus on a particular industry, but on value creation:

“Apply Market-Based Management to identify and capture those opportunities for which our capabilities will create the greatest value and develop and implement strategies that will maximize this value long-term.”

Measure Meaningful Things

To reach these lofty goals both Koch and Buffett rigorously look to align the incentives of their companies and employees with creating value for shareholders and society.

“I believe in establishing yardsticks prior to the act; retrospectively, almost anything can be made to look good in relation to something or other.”  Buffett’s basic theory of return on investment is to focus on “the return on equity capital — that is, the percentage profit on each dollar invested.”  He strongly emphasized not wasting time on quarterly projections and other time-wasters.

Koch also frowns on needless paperwork and aims to measure profitability whenever it is practical, placing emphasis on value created by the economics means rather than by the political means.

Compliance

After a series of government investigations and media attacks in the 1980s 1990s, Koch restructured his company and added an entire division to focus on the public sector and compliance. This fueled a new stage of growth.

Buffett also sees the value in operating within the legal environment.  While he does his best to invest in companies with high standards and good management, from time to time he finds himself holding a bad apple. When unordinary situations have arisen, such as they did with the fraud at Salomon Brothers, Buffett felt it his duty as a long-term investor to help restore the company’s long-term position as a financial leader.

As Lowenstein frames it: by the end of the ordeal, Buffett had been so compliant that if the regulators had punished him too severely, they would be encouraging less cooperation in the future from other corporations under similar investigations.

Focus on Good People and Long-term Relationships

Though perhaps the value that trumps all else is one of character. ”[M]ost people, regardless of what they say, are looking for appreciation as much as they are for money,” writes Lowenstein.

Buffett and Koch both seem to understand this and act accordingly as they search for new investment opportunities and new personnel.  Their investment decisions focus on long-term value.

Koch avoids operating as a public company as he believes their quarterly requirements to be adverse short-term incentives. Buffett refuses to offer dividends or divide his stock in order to attract long-term investors.  Koch upholds a rigorous hiring process and would place a higher value on someone with good character and adequate skills over someone with adequate character and high skills.  Buffett chooses to invest in companies whose management he trusts and believes will be running their company for a long time.

Food for Ninjas Competitive Cooking Blog

Food is meant to be shared and, relentlessly, it is compared.  What started out as a shared Google Doc between some friends and family has now become a competitive cooking blog worth flippin’ out about. Epicurious George reporting from Food for Ninjas.

Improving the Design of Tax Forms: Identifying the Problem

If information design has a golden challenge, it is to redesign the U.S. tax forms.  These behemoths ooze the opportunity for improvement.  Not only do they clothe a complex tax in a dismal plaid, but every year they encourage thousands of diligent, hardworking citizens (unable to understand their own tax returns) to tempt hordes of labor away from other value-creating activities.

The 1040 (and its offspring the 1040A, 1040EZ) are not the only culprits, but they will be my inspiration today.  Is there a good reason these forms are confusing?  Yes.  Several.  However, the challenge of the information designer is not to overhaul the tax system, it is to take the problem at hand, and make it beautiful (at least from the user-experience perspective).  Let’s walk through four common elements of good design and see if we can identify why the average taxpayer is so confused.

If you’d like to follow along: our challenge awaits here.

Proximity
Good design groups related items together.  It’s how our brain works.  If you see a man and a women walking together, gazing into each others eyes, you might assume they’re married.  The same principle is true for items on a form.  Though our culprit, the 1040, just may be leading us on…

At first glance, the 1040 appears to have been grouped into sections of similar data:  Label, Filing Status, Exemptions, Adjusted Gross Income, Tax and Credits.  Though as we begin to look into the detail of these sections a number of unexplainable relationships emerge from the design.  How are Other Taxes different from Tax and Credits?  Why do some deductions fall under Adjusted Gross Income and others fall under Tax and Credits?  Do you want $3 to go to the Presidential Election Campaign? Wait a second, what is this doing in the Label section (and where are the check boxes for us to allocate the rest of our money to projects we support)?

Alignment
Elements that line up with one another help create a visual order.  The alignment of letters along their baselines and blocks of text (to the left, right, or center) help organize the elements on the page for the viewer.  Alignment is most easily applied to shapes with nice, straight edges.  It’s a bit more challenging to work with text, but quite possible to succeed.

The 1040 does pretty well aligning elements in some respects.  The rectangular spaces available to fill in our personal information, income , and other data line up for the most part.  The rows are indented where a subtotal needs to be calculated.  The line numbers and the start of each line also do just fine.  But when we look to the right side of the text at the other end of each line (on the page and in the left margin), the text on the page becomes quite jarring.  Hardly any of the lines match up, and when viewed as a whole, the text on the page looks extremely jagged, frequently disrupting the flow of the viewer’s eye.

On top of this, nearly each line refers to a complimentary schedule, form, or page to help you calculate it.  This information is not differentiated in any way, it just blends in with the madness.  For example, to determine a health savings account deduction, you are to fill out form 8889.  For farm income and losses, you need to attach Schedule F.  Each form is hidden at the end of its respective line, wherever that may be.  Some relationships, like with Standard and Itemized Deductions, are even more confusing.  Itemized Deductions refer you to Schedule A in the line, and then give a set of instructions in the left margin regarding the standard deduction.  Without the help of alignment, or some other element of design such as contrast, there is no easy way to scan the 1040 in search of this information.  It could be anywhere.

Repetition
Repeated elements (such as graphics, fonts, and size) help make a design consistent.  See inconsistencies in all other sections.

Contrast
Contrast draws a viewer in and creates visual hierarchy. The point of highest contrast attracts the eye’s attention.

So where is your eye drawn to on the 1040?  Probably the header or the arrows instructing that you must enter your social security numbers and Sign here.  Just about everything else blurs together into a gray fog.  There are a good number of words (and other elements) in bold, but if your eye even happens to focus in on them, they generally come off as a combination of erratic highlighting and incoherent fragments of sentences.  This is not helped by the text being an abundant, dense block of sans-serif type at a small font size.  The only thing they could have done to make it less readable would be to make it all CAPS.  Perhaps we can expect this next year.

Tools for Web Development

Just a few tools I’ve found quite useful in my (mac-based) workflow:

XHTML
TextMate: A true productivity enhancer. Costs a few bucks but worth every penny.  Be sure to familiarize yourself with all the shortcuts and available bundles as well as the trick for how to edit remote files.

CSS
CSS Edit:  Another beautiful program.  X-ray view allows you to really dig into your CSS and is very handy for troubleshooting.
Blueprint CSS: Well grounded CSS framework for straightforward, quick development.

Content Management
Expression Engine: This CMS is wonderful.  Simple to use, well documented, and great pricing.  It has allowed me to focus on designing websites with XHTML and CSS, while simplifying the tools to create dynamic websites.  Also, has a pretty user-friendly admin side.  The forums are quite useful for any problems that arise.

FTP Client
Transmit: I searched long and far for an FTP program that has the same column view as Mac’s Finder and Transmit is it.  Great program all around.

Plugins
Web Developer Toolbar: While there are prettier browsers out there to surf the web, if you develop websites Firefox is really the way to go. This extension adds a host of tools to your arsenal.
Firebug: This one adds more.
YSlow: And this one even more!

Gorehorn, the Adventure Pony

If you’re looking for an activity to soften a long drive, I recommend an extravagant Mix CD Challenge!  Our trip was from Arlington, Virginia to Durham, North Carolina.  The challenge was simple: invent two album names and assign them to other people on the trip.  Each person takes the album names they are given, contemplates for a while, stirs up a vision, and creates the perfect mix for such an album name.  The results can be stunning and add a whole new dimension to the music you once thought you knew.  While I can’t share our concoctions so easily, the album names should reflect how we made four hours speed by in a flash:

• Euclid’s Last Stand
• Genghis Kahn and the Band Wagon
• Goodnight Spoon
• Gorehorn, the Adventure Pony
• How To Dismantle a ‘71 Ford Pinto’
• Jeanne Kirkpatrick Overdrive
• Kind of Periwinkle
• The Longings of Seedless Watermelons

On Composition and Communication

Words, and the Placement Of is not about words.  It is about understanding the relationship between human nature and effective communication, and exploring the universal elements of composition.  It is a project that grows out of my desire to communicate more effectively with my clients, colleagues, students, friends, and family.  The majority of these studies will probably focus on the visual arts, but I don’t wish to limit the scope of this project.  Its themes will shift as my interests shift.

The project evolves out of one primary observation: Many people are good communicators in one medium and have no idea how to transfer these skills to a different medium.  A great speaker, who can compose her words with precise timing and inflection to win over any audience, finds herself incapable of creating an interesting PowerPoint presentation.  A writer, whose everyday words flow like poetry and bring smiles to his readers faces, has no idea where to begin when he needs to complement his ideas with a chart or image.  And when each of these great analytical minds show you their resume, an array of substantial qualifications is complemented with redundancy and little clarity.

Composition is Communication

Whether you like it or not, you’re a designer.  And much more.  If you’re involved with the placement of graphic symbols, words, or phonetics in space and time, you’re a composer, and you are telling your audience things that are explicitly and implicitly embed in your composition.  Just because you have no interest in serifs (the cross-strokes at the end of characters in some typefaces) or leading (the space between lines of text) doesn’t mean a dense block of sans-serif type won’t slow your audiences’ ability to receive your message.

As the media which we use to communicate — writing, images, speech, and space — become more interrelated, the awareness we have of a communicator’s gap in skills is amplified.

Composition is broader than the arts

Let’s look at one — fictitious, though not too uncommon — situation:  A speaker (physical composition) addresses an audience in a lecture hall (spacial composition) with the aid of a slide presentation (digital composition) and a handout (print composition).  The talk is recorded on video (film composition) and also to be released as a podcast (audio composition).  The talk is advertised with a short summary and the speaker’s bio, as a flyer (written composition) and on the web (web composition).

Make your wishes to let the painters, novelists, and musicians be the only ones who need to worry about composition, but as the tools of communication become more accessible to a wider audience, the responsibility of a composition’s success falls more and more in the hands of you, the everyday communicator.

Effective communication requires an understanding of human nature

Some people are born good communicators, and others must learn. The good news is that these skills can be learned. The better news is that, if you’re already a strong communicator in one medium, understanding the principles of good communication in another medium is likely closer than you think.

Words, and the Placement Of aims to facilitate an understanding between an expert, superficial knowledge in one medium and an expert, fundamental knowledge across several media.  The coming posts will explore the tools and relationships involved in this process.

Update: April 2008

A re-posting of a recent letter that I sent to family and friends.

Well into the new year, so much has changed and I just wanted to pause a moment, greet you with a note, and share a few stories (likely with too many references to economics!).

Two years ago I moved out to the mysterious land of Virginia (where people introduce themselves with their full name).  It’s no California, but it was good enough for Thomas Jefferson and has turned out to be quite good to me.  I have benefit from good company, plenty of opportunities, and, pleasantly, an enjoyable dance scene (where I have lead only one, fortunate, relationship-commencing, knee injury).

Up until this past October I worked at the Institute for Humane Studies.  My main responsibility was to manage our globalization education project which included maintaining a website and directing several summer seminars on the topic.  The job gave me the opportunity to work with several top notch faculty members and hundreds of bright, enthusiastic students.  In the process, I have increased my fondness of teaching basic economic principles and developed a strong interest in alternatives to our traditional methods of education.

In the spirit of education, this past Fall greeted me with some new opportunities.  I made it over to Switzerland for a one week conference on sustainability.  I won’t hazard a guess as to whether I will remember the bike rides through the Alps or my hosts’ Malthusian diatribes with more clarity, though if I were to recommend a memorable experience, the way the layers of clouds pattern the valley below Braunwald is indeed striking.

On my return, and with my blessing, it was decided that we cancel the globalization project I was working on.  It’s a challenging decision to terminate something you have worked hard to make succeed, yet my economics training never fails to remind me that if you can’t increase the value of the resources you are using, you are best to let those resources find a higher valued use elsewhere.  The shocking part came as I realized half of my job was contingent on this decision.

While it is only human nature to be somewhat frustrated at the occurrence of unexpected change, I responded in another way only something as savvy as human nature could suggest: I didn’t sleep for three days.  After a handful of conversations with close friends (and with myself), somewhere between insomnia and bliss, it became clear that I too was a misallocated resource and due for some new goals.

Programming, animation, web design: they all got put on the top of my list.  I started training in a variety of internet technologies and began the process of beginning my own information design business aptly titled: Information is Beautiful.  And it is.  (Nicely, the seminar half of my job at IHS is also still on my plate.)

In a year or so, I’m sure I will have a few more stories to share.  I’m sure they will be full of romance, intrigue, and the struggles and triumphs of a protagonist and his trade.

In the meantime, I wish you many beautiful days.  I hope you are in good health and spending time with the people and pursuits that you love.  Let me know if you will be in Virginia in the near future and I promise I won’t geek out (too much) about productivity blogs, the wonders of Javascript libraries, Edward Tufte, or Settlers of Catan.

Economic Freedom and GDP per capita — Gapminder-style

For a while now I’ve shared common hopes to have the Economic Freedom data take new forms.  The relationship between Economic Freedom and GDP per capita for example is not hard to imagine, however there is always something a bit more compelling about a nice visualization.  Gapminder’s Trendalyzer seemed to have established the perfect format — it was just a matter of time before unique data sets could be plotted in a similar manner.  Google has now made this possible, and with the release of their new spreadsheet gadgets I’ve taken the opportunity to dive into the Economic Freedom data, and add motion.

This first graph compares the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal’s Index of Economic Freedom country scores with GDP per capita in US dollars as reported from the United Nations Common Database the data from 2000–2005.  Colors denote regions.  Size denotes population.

This second graph uses the same data minus some of the clutter.  I’ve selected to display just a few countries which I think are interesting to compare to one another: North Korea and South Korea, China and Hong Kong, Cuba and Spain, and Botswana and Zimbabwe.

A hat-tip to Google for making this powerful tool available at such an accessible level. Now, on with setting free all that interesting information housed in academic jargon, repelling visuals, and bullet-pointed presentations.

Dinosaurlandia

Deep in the heart of Virginia, six friends find themselves in a land unfamiliar and rare…  Their task: 1) Shoot a bunch of video, 2) Share that video amongst everyone, and 3) Let each person tell the story as it was.  Here’s my take on the fiction-enhanced memories.

UPDATE: Another fine entry: Dinos Alive!

Book Review: Fooled by Randomness

“Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette.  First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands, of chambers instead of six.  After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under numbing false sense of security,” says Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  He refers to this as the black swan problem.

Mistaking Luck For Skill

Fooled by Randomness is a book about mistaking luck for skill, a mistake Taleb sees most prevalent in journalism and the world of markets.  At the root, “risk detection and risk-avoidance are not mediated in the ‘thinking’ part of the brain but largely in the emotional one.”  “The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance.  Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one’s actions by fitting some logic to them.”

Yet, ”[p]eople fail to learn that their emotional reactions to past experiences (positive or negative) were short-lived.”  ”[T]hey continuously retain the bias of thinking that the purchase of an object will bring long-lasting, possibly permanent, happiness or that a setback will cause severe and prolonged distress (when in the past similar setbacks did not affect them for very long and the joy of the purchase was short-lived).”

He paraphrases a remark by Einstein: ”[C]ommon sense is nothing but a collection of misperceptions acquired by the age eighteen.”

Other Common Misperceptions

Taleb also redefines a common misperception of the word ‘mistake’:  “A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.”

This point ties succinctly with the concept of creative destruction which embraces the role of failure in development.  Mistakes need not be avoided, but learned from.  But, many environments are not conducive to such a framework.  Many of these frameworks have been engrained in society and social relationships for years.  Taleb explores why “bad traders have a short- and medium-term survival advantage over good traders,”  by tying the world of markets to naive evolutionary theories.

”[M]any amateurs believe that plants and animals reproduce on a one-way route toward perfection. Translating the idea to social terms, they believe that companies and organizations are, thanks to competition… irreversibly heading toward betterment.”  This is simply not true.

Taleb offers multiple reasons.  I will follow each with a few of my own thoughts.

1) Organizations do not reproduce like living members of nature.  Competition is never between buyers and sellers.  It is always between buyers and buyers or sellers and sellers.  While finding the perfect mate could fall in the same category as competition between businesses, reproduction is different in many ways.  Perhaps a more valid metric to compare the social environment of organizations to reproduction would be one of accessibility.  That is, to what level do companies, or mates, have the opportunity to enter or exit the marketplace?

2) Randomeness.  Some mutations are for the better, others for the worse.  “Negative mutations (Gould) are traits that survive in spite of being worse, from the reproductive fitness standpoint, than the ones they replaced.”  Again, this acquires a level of complexity when translated into social terms.  While market trends may be surprising on their own, subsidies, labor protection laws, and a variety of other market distorting policies add another level of randomness to the mix, often allowing unprofitable enterprises (negative mutations) to survive.

In Taleb’s mathematical verse: “Just as an animal could have survived because its sample path was lucky, the “best” operators in a given business can come from a subset of operators who survived because of over-fitness to a sample path—a sample path that was free of the evolutionary rare event.” ”[E]volution means fitness to one and only one time series, not the average of all possible environments.”

The Dive Bar that is Journalism

Distinguishing between signal and noise is widespread, though, journalism receives the largest swath of Taleb’s relentless skepticism: ”[J]ournalism may be the greatest plague we face today—as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification.”

This effect of this large-scale compression—going from the particular to the general—“is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness.”  Journalism, through induction, favors the palatable over the counter-intuitive.  In sum: ”[M]ost poetic sounding adages are plain wrong.”

From journalism to winning streaks, “if someone performed better than the crowd in the past, there is a presumption of his ability to do better in the future.”  But this is a weak presumption.  It depends on two factors: “The randomness content of his profession and the number of monkeys in operation.”

While Taleb doesn’t offer any advice on which particular profession to choose, he does offer a suggestion.  Don’t shoot for a profession where you only like the way people live at the top. Consider the lifestyle of the average person, there are many more of them.

Escaping Randomness (Kind of)

The idea of alternative histories across several disciplines all seem to converge on the same concept of risk and uncertainty: “certainty is something that is likely to take place across the highest number of different alternative histories;  uncertainty concerns events that should take place in the lowest number of them.”  Taleb mentions examples in philosophy, physics and economics.

However certain this convergence may appear, one still has to stay alert.  Profits and losses are never guaranteed.  “The frequency or probability of [a] loss, in and by itself, is totally irrelevant; it needs to be judged in connection with the magnitude of the outcome.”

Book Review: Why Wages Rise

At a talk this Fall, Charles Koch mentioned that the book Why Wages Rise by F.A. Harper was an influential book in his career.  Curious of the subject and the inspirations of such a successful man, I decided I best read it myself.

It was fascinating to see that the book did not begin with much framing and jumped right into the discussion with a focus on labor unions and the misperception that their demands lead to a rise in wages.  This says a lot about who Harper was trying to communicate these ideas to and places the stage of development of the US economy at the time the book was written, in 1957.

Harper draws a nice analogy to explain why it can be harmful to simply raise workers wages without a commensurate increase in productivity:

During 1955, the average pay of an employee of GM was $5,011.  Yet GM’s profits for the year were $1,189,477,082 (or $3,751,477,082 before any ascertainable taxes) on a total business of $12,433,277,420.  It can be seen at a glance that doubling the pay of this employee would be no more noticeable in the whole enterprise than would be the adding of another automobile to those owned in the State of Michigan.

Doubling the pay of all GM employees, however, would be quite a different story.  It would eat up in one year more than the total value of the firm’s real estate, plants, and equipment.

He continues to explain how productivity is the true source of real wage increases and how inflation can harm wages.  He emphasizes the role a sound currency play when considering wages:

When you accept money in trade, you are proceeding on faith in it as a sort of implied contract.  The implied contract is this:  When you trade something for money as an intermediate step to getting what you eventually want in exchange, you are operating on the assumption that the money will serve your intent rather than thwart it.

Harper’s broad approach to understanding the forces which influence wages is commendable.  I truly enjoyed Harper’s use of images throughout the book to complement his main points.  Here are a few of my favorites:

The Business Cycle

The eloquence of this graph captures the fluctuation of the economy as a force that is always present rather than a cycle that fluctuates around some sort of equilibrium, as the business cycle is often depicted.

Buying Power

What I particularly like about this graph is how it labels the section in between the citizens buying power before taxes, and the citizens buying power after taxes. The section is labeled: The Cost of Being Governed.  I find the language eye opening in a small way.  Most of the costs that we have in our life we try to find a way to reduce.  Increased productivity involves identifying better ways to do things and then changing our ways accordingly, freeing up more time to invest in other ways or for leisure in the process.  By framing the data in such a way, it suggests that governance has a specific role in the economy and leaves the hope that: if we can improve the ways in which we currently govern our society, we can reduce our necessity of this governance, freeing up more time to invest in other ways or for leisure across the society.  A very nice way to put it.

Recipe: Mock Mince Meat Pie

Mix together the following ingredients and stir until well-blended.

1.5 cups Seedless Raisins 4 medium-sized Tart Apples (Cut into small pieces and squeeze in lemon juice so they do not turn brown) 10-15 dried Apricots (Cut into Small peices) Grated rind of 1 large Orange Juice of one Orange .5 cup of Sparkling Apple Cider (or other fruit juice) Handful of broken Walnuts (optional) .75 - 1 cup Brown Sugar (a mix of brown and white sugar is also good)

In a large frying pan, cover these ingredients and simmer until the apples are very soft (add more cider to keep them from scorching).  (You can also add in 2-3 tablespoons of Brandy while these wonderful flavors are simmering together.)

I mixed these in with the above ingredients (minus the crackers and tapioca, which I did not include).  Mom might have suggested these ingredients get mixed in after the simmering (I couldn’t tell from the handwriting).

.5 tsp Cinnamon .5 tsp Cloves 1+ tsp fresh grated Nutmeg 2-3 tlbs finely crushed soda cracker (or cracker meal and 2-3 tlbs tapiocca)

Preheat oven to 450 Make a nice Pie Crust

Bake for 30 minutes or so.

Mmmmmm!

My Flourescent Persona

February 2001, Narrative Verse

Having just returned from the grocery store, I am with my friends, entering the house from the north side. He begins passing as we unlatch the door, taking note of a florescent orange scrap which lies on the ground. Everybody knows him, he passes the house many times a day. He’s mostly referred to as the guy with the Barbie tucked into his football helmet or the guy that walks like this.

Today he is wearing the usual bright colors, layers of vividly striped shirts, on and wrapped around his waist where he fastens his pink bunny along with other items, trinkets of his personality. The left pant-leg of his faded blue jeans is securely pegged at the knee. Loose tennis shoes chase his feet and his selected headgear is a boxy, brandless, florescent-green cap over a paisley forest-green bandana disguised in more attached finds and an array of ballpoint pens wedged into the band of his swimming goggles. All this set off with a silver-laced smile.

Our eyes meet, though, as this makes our intentions vulnerable we quickly look back to our respective paths. I wonder his name… My friends are already heading downstairs toward the kitchen. I hold back, curious, peering out the small window on the door as it closes. His walk, confident, brisk with a hint of athleticism, exhibits a pause. He turns back toward the florescent orange scrap lying exposed, approaches and stands in observation for a moment. Decided, he reaches down, gathers and houses the treasure alongside his waist, as if he has found a piece of himself.

An Onslaught of Caterpillars to an Air-Conditioned Building in Florida

November 2003, Italian Sonnet, Take 2

A million footprints far away from branch
Abandoned, why? No parachutes or silk
String routes, pre-made cocoons or juice or milk
Await, yet still they fall as an avalanche
May hurry down. They flex their glands, crash land
Dismiss their guilt, reorient and bilk
The prey and predators they stilt—full tilt,
And like an arrow, make for the entrance.

From solitaire and lazy window gaze,
Through hall to patio, a cool demise.
The door hydraulically slows down to aid
A million feet beneath a glow of eyes.
What does it matter who will win the race?
They will not be tomorrow’s butterflies.

Temporal to the White Sea (As told by a critter to his kind)

October 2003, Blank Verse

The sea was blue for gravity, appeased,
Had pulled the blood of sky unto her depths,
With cold hand, tucking every tide between
The sands, as space calmly skipped asteroids
Across her breadth. In step with time, she took
A breath, nevertheless, quite hydrokinetic
And asymmetric—just this once. It’s said

Her shadows housed red fire—a vein between
The trenches and mountaintops, aloft, embraced
In nimbostratus—plentiful and racing
At a catastrophic alien pace.
The breeze, She held a sip of mist, permit a taste—
A tease of seasons, nonetheless, displaced—
Then hopped a hill to quench the groves who grew
As tides unto thus high. And as an eye
Who never winks, our clearing fathomed fate
At hand. Her lush grass grasped in fist of soil,
An offering to tempt the wave to land.

Now sea aside and trees asunder, close
We sit in history’s cold wake, the dark
Blue skyline silenced by a cumulous
Rouge silhouette with solar eclipse drawn
Upon—her lunar awning from folklore
And myth, eons beyond this campfire pit.