Republished with permission of "The Wall Street Journal," July 16, 1993
Humorous quatrain
The world sneers at our schools: our knowledge of geography just enough to locate Disneyland; mathematics puzzling esoteric; chemistry and physics the province…
Give Me No Perfect Things Give me no perfect things: a snowflake - kalaidoscopic, machine-cut, different but all alike,
Levels of Innuendo The cosmos may contain a constella… That holds a jealous planet, one t… To hurt some stars with black insi… And smudge with covert smears thei…
The score now even after Jordan’s… up yours, you punk, confess before… she’d deceived you, Lance, her pre… see the Bible, frayunds, Isaiah f… four-car wreck on Hempstead, now t…
Florida, 2000 A.D. A panting tongue of a tiring natio… lapping a tawdry cornucopia poured like broken baubles down th… through the northern end of Southe…
My parents always seemed to be hum… Protecting beasts once sought with… And eating guiltily the ones still… Ennobling evolution’s theme . . .… They gave me newer weapons, bats a…
I will not wear shorts, wing-tip s… I will continue to be grateful tha… I will not listen to any salesman… I will quit telling people how I… I will not say, “I don’t know wha…
A poem should be allowed to say something; good ones often have. It isn’t by necessity a fakir’s cabalistic drone
He could not paint a world that g… For his shimmered softly. His cliffs, cathedrals, seas appe… congenial things of liquid light; and even locomotives seem
System Restore (free verse with incidental rhyme,… Last week, not thinking, I punched a strange computer key and spawned unceasing lunatic para…
Just off a country road a balding… Reclines in spring upon a pinkish… Of dogwood, which on any better da… Supports, at least in poems, a “fe… Or, worse, that “lifts to God its…
My First Pot Boiler (George Meredith advised Thomas… Dear Publisher: I’ve joined a fiction writing grou… Techniques that writing experts ha…
I hate the callow ones who think t… And have therefore the right to cr… I hate the ones who charge me twen… So I can try to win a ten-buck pr… I hate the ones whom you will irri…
Pasiphae, like any ancient Greek, Was avid fan of bestiality And lusted for the Cretan bull’s… But he, bull-headed, snubbed her u… For this bovine disliked a human f…
Poesy’s Progress My rhymes are gone, at least quite… my lines are stop– ped just anywhere. The meter is, no doubt, unconscion…