There Lived a Red-Haired Man
There lived a red-haired man
Who had no eyes or ears.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Always a little better than he pretends
And a little worse than he wishes, my friend,
Saying words that should be written down,
Displaying a smile that is often a frown.

As soon as the words strolled
Across the doctor’s lips,
She realized the cold waste -

When Nelson dies,
All two hundred and six
Of my broken bones
Will ache for you.

Bright Star starring John Keats
John Keats rests his head as angular
as two racially white blades of hay.

Life Story starring Jeff Goldblum
The mystery has a name, Jeff Goldblum.

y November you already thought of returning,
rubbing Vaseline into your palms and the crevices
of your cracked heels. No napalm rained down in a foreign land,
no birth dates streamed across the screen to push our brothers into war.

There’s a house
a half an hour south
of town,
built of stones
my father hauled
from down the road
in his old Ford
Fairlane. He built it for
my mother when she asked.

The Great Drying-Up is coming.
I can feel it in
the way I’m beginning...

It's the little things you remember when you die.
The children. The moments. Your face after
achieving multiple simultaneous orgasms. The orgasms.
The presidential campaigns, the incipient volcano
underlying the western half of the continental U.S.
It's the little things that make you wonder.

People change. People estrange. The wear and tear on the asbestos flange
took my grandfather at seventy-five. My grandmother is alive,
and turning eighty. The moon landing is forty. I am twenty. Ten, five.

An untitled work.