One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring."

... man is eating the earth up like a candy bar.

Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside

You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed; lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.

It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.

The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.