DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM

As the ground became
increasingly inevitable,
he began to appreciate
the subtle difference between

flying and falling.
I was, sadly, the
last in a life-long
series of last-second

realizations. But
was it the most
important one? Possibly,
though the question of

relative importance remains
ultimately a matter of taste.

AS THOUGH

In the greatest "as
though" ever, a night
I lie down in turns
out not to be death,

but a dream
of not waking up.
Sainthood surprised
me with its dull

knife. Ecstasy
sings its song
as if love were
a room in which

Naomi waits
impatiently for dawn.

AN APOLOGY

I write about death a lot in my poems to make you think about death so I won't have to. Sorry.

WOMAN TOO

Sometimes I let my mind
graze in the neighbor's pasture.
His grass is a lot greener
than mine, and his wife's

a woman any man in
good health would be
foolish not to covet.
I have to use a road

less traveled by to get
to the neighbor's place
because of a wall he's
built between us.

Earth's the right place for
man. For woman too.

RENDEZVOUS

We have to stop meeting
like this. In my poems,
I mean. It's not so much
that people have begun

to talk (we've never
cared about what others
thought of us) as that
there may be other, more

interesting places to meet.
At Starbucks, for example,
over matching cups of
cappuccino. At the corner

of Anywhere and Vine,
where people touch and go blind.

THE GAUNTLET

I'm postmodern when it suits me and modern, or even ante-modern, when I'd rather. What are you going to do about it?!

THE NEXT VILLAGE

Like a one-way
palindrome to nowhere,
I circle back
into myself,

repeating what goes
without saying so
many times that
no one believes

a word I say
anymore in defense of
this tiresome journey
in the direction of what will

almost certainly turn out
to be the next village.