Republished with permission of "The Wall Street Journal," July 16, 1993
#HumorousQuatrain
They all seem old, with huge, bushy beards, their soiled rags incongruous in the sleek, polished chairs. Not allowed bundles
A Wake In Florida’s woods there stands a… Still silo-girthed but leaning now… The trunk bone-white, stripped of… The spectral limbs shattered, gone…
Guidebook for Immigrants Part I. Making Your Vocabulary… “On sale!” “Reduced!” and “Absolu… Are usually milder forms of larcen… “Adult” means “dirty films” and g…
Gimme That Ole-Time Religion I As one New Yorker said, the guy w… You in New York, your wallet as h… At least has goals, unlike the oth… Who kill and maim and have no aim…
A poem should be allowed to say something; good ones often have. It isn’t by necessity a fakir’s cabalistic drone
A Funeral Cortege Verse now slain by latest dogma, down the cobbled street come mourn… trundling Verse’s coffin forward, charging all to note the corpus,
To men an infant’s mostly irritati… But his libido often seems impress… By females features favoring procr… The pelvis flared, the heavy sway… And thus, some women, knowing what…
Intelligent Design? Verbalizer of finest thoughts, A soft, vulnerable thumb of flesh is rooted in the floor of a fetid… edged above and below the ingress
The Anguish of Action We frame and then pursue specific… But find results are not what we h… Christ advocated love to all his l… Who then loved some —turned tigers…
Above the stores medieval grimness… stones coffin-sized in high gray w… exuding dampness of tombs, lichene… towering inward, threatening Gothi… across the twisting cart-wide lane…
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…
Suggest an early death deserves our envy, *Hardy wrote a book of short stories called “Life’s Little Ironies.” **Hardy was often cr...
Thoughts on Cloning Someday the labs will make routine The methods used to clone me. But when my own’s an irksome teen I fear I might disown me.
The meter of this poem will be like ticks of a clock — no, I mean, ticks of clocks. On contemplation of my navel I see only what appears to be
Vocations Envy those conjoined to function: ballerinas shopping in fifth posit… humming coroners ladling brains silent Harpo honking his horn