Circular Education
Amazed at all the quick information
I now can gain from electronic media,
In my old age I remember the blue-backed
Volumes of my boyhood’s encyclopedia.
 
Each bought weekly for carefully saved pennies
Through a supermarket’s promotional scheme,
Those cheaply printed books were my source
For facts, surely, but also many a dream.
 
No Britannica with elegant onionskin pages
And certainly riddled with errors, in those
I was first taught that knowledge can be netted
And held in alphabetized cages of prose.
 
On shelves of pine my father assembled
They sat, badly illustrated, poorly bound,
Where I learned that the world, when questioned,
Has places in it where answers are found.
 
I know by now those books are papery dust
As I am soon no doubt destined to be.
Still, I share yet their futile ambition:
To categorize the truth from A to Z.


Addicted
I open a box marked Winston
And extract a tube of death—
Another one for shortening
My allotted store of breath.
 
It was an Englishman named Raleigh
Who brought tobacco back
And taught all the world the way
Of dying pack by pack.

I keep persisting like a fool,
Drawing smoke across my tongue,
Ignoring what is happening--
The blackening of each lung.
 
I know one day that I will quit
This habit and this sin:
The day my body’s finally done
With pulling air within.


Co-Evolution
On his way up to civilization
Homo sapiens guessed that dogs and cats
Might be useful in keeping his stored-up grain
Relatively clear of mice and rats.
 
The dogs and cats on their own way
To civilization shrewdly had a hunch
That this semi-hairless sap on two legs
Could be the source of a free and endless lunch.


Dick Corey
He did what?  Shot himself?
Put a bullet through his head?
You’re serious? Certain about that?
Jee-zuss! Dick Corey dead!

Sure, I knew him. Went to Harvard
With him, Class of Oh-Three.
Oh, shit. Maybe he found out
About his wife and me.


Fashion Statement
Did Lazarus, one of the world’s
Few resurrected men,
Have a wife who went into widowhood
And came right out again?
 
And did she turn and rail at him,
“What the hell are you doing back--
I’ve come to like having people say
How good I look in black.”?