Published with permission by "The Wall Street Journal," Sept.12, 1993-
#HumorousPersonal
Savage Customs Dakota Indians placed a seed insi… The mouths of those they buried, a… A small but sturdy seedling gratif… The tribe, new life ascending from…
A Grecian corpse’s mouth containe… Placed there by kin who thought he… To pay the toll required to cross… (A job that Charon got through po… He sold another chit for their ret…
I am a horse, a patient, plodding hack harnessed behind a chromed cart — a cart I push when told to go and stop when told to whoa.
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
System Restore (free verse with incidental rhyme,… Last week, not thinking, I punched a strange computer key and spawned unceasing lunatic para…
The Inmate (a sestina) My parents, souls revering freedom… took turns at serving as my jailer to show me how constraints are rig…
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
A big brown dog, gray around the muzzle, lay in the front yard of an old h… between his front paws a tennis ba… As we walked by,
My myths have talking ducks and dogs mice making Roman arches in the baseboa… burglars
One day when Richard’s brother, R… Had heard enough of “such a terrib… He chucked his poise and turned wi… the gleeful mourners gathered on t… And said, “Your tears, my friends…
Vocations Envy those conjoined to function: ballerinas shopping in fifth posit… humming coroners ladling brains silent Harpo honking his horn
The Skaters Nothing is less of the earth than couples skating: the woman in her white raiment clean, clean, and full of light,
Verse now slain by latest dogma, down the cobbled street come mourn… trundling Verse’s coffin forward, charging all to note the corpus, garroted for disregarding
A soft, vulnerable thumb of flesh, used to make verbal the finest tho… is rooted in the floor of a fetid… edged from ingress by crescents of… rocklike cubes clashing together,…
Tracing writhing streams, circling alpine wastes, tickling out a finger nudged between two behemoths, the crooked ring completed at last