I Lisp'd in Numbers
The novelist, certain of immortality,
Undergirds his work with versions of myth.
The epigrammatist, knowing that he writes in snow,
Depends on the power only of his own pith.

Boredom: Porno
Though not to watch I am admonished
Nevertheless when I do I am astonished
At how really few are the ways that flesh
Can be made to mingle, merge, and mesh.

Claims Adjustment
That a slightly overweight insurance
Executive with thinning white hair
Who did most of his living in a quiet room
In a comfortably upper middle class house
In a small inland Connecticut city
Contemplating the age-old philosophical
Question of "The One and the Various"

Should come to become considered his century's
Most important American poet is exactly the kind
Of ironic truth that a slightly overweight
Insurance executive with thinning white hair
Would, in his quiet room in a comfortably upper
Middle class house in a small inland
Connecticut city, find precisely hilarious.

Road Work
They tell me that I must set myself some goals
And then make sure that I achieve them---
This, they say, is essential to my soul's saving,

Not knowing that I am a fully licensed
Heavy Equipment Operator
For a company called Good Intentions Paving.

On the Painters of Russian Icons
They've made blond my dark Christ.
They have drawn His Face thin.
Gold is the wisp-wire beard
They painted on His Chin.

But Child and Mother Mary?
Deep-eyed, somber and sad.
Ah, as we say in America,
Two out of three ain't bad.

On Envy
I know a man who is upright,
Virtuous, totally without fault.
Ah, I see he is wounded---
Let me get some salt.

Reading Writer's Market
I think often of Emily Dickinson
Saying to herself with a sigh
As she made a fair copy of a poem,
"Another no journal will buy."

On the Only Certain
Veritas that is in Vino
I drink through all the night
Cheap red Gallo wine,
And think how it sharpens
My conversational wit,

Yet the knowledge that I take
From all my drinking is
How runny tomorrow
Will be the shit I shit.

Point of View
Fish in aquaria appraise us
With slow and sidewise looks,
Glad that we're behind the glass
That bars our nets and hooks.

Prosody
The Old Formalist loves to answer
Positively with an "Okey Dokey,"
Smiling in his knowledge that he's employed
A dimeter using the age-old trochee.

Lament: English 101
Teaching undergraduates
Is really, really hard.
One asked the other day
If the Light Brigade's Charge
Was on Visa or on Mastercard.