We are gathered here today.
We weren't here yesterday.
We won't be here tomorrow.
Everything I want is good.
Having everything I want is good.
Everything that thwarts me is an abomination.
Mirth is a symptom, not the cure.
If you can't change your path, change your velocity.
The most salient fact of the libidodo bird, i.e., that it is extinct.
The relative privilege of not having been victimized
in the ways others acknowledge.
The time is never right to disinter the treasure you've buried.
Time, also, is always wrong when it does so.
All the teddy bears from before 1978 have bemused looks on their faces.
Freedom, as we so often see, includes the freedom to choose
to be constrained.  There is not enough I in my I to satisfy
most poetry editors, who trade in illusions of identity and creation.
I would idle idly forever before I would worship your silly idols for a moment.
Every cyclops a penis; every siren, a vainglorious vagina.
But familiarity can also lead to fondness.
And how much one would prefer to be fond than contemptuous.
Communication is not control.  You cannot compel me to accept your pact.
Anything can be reduced to consumption.  Everything.
Even production requires consumption, results in consumption.
In this time, we don't talk enough about responsibility,
about culpability, about consequences.
We want to let everyone off the hook.
Why would I care about my ancestors?
Why would I care about my descendants?
What do they have to do with me?
Talk to my genes, if you're looking for that particular obsession.
Without love, without need,
death is barely an inconvenience to anybody.
But the only thing I have ever loved is exoticism.
No, I have always been so in love with banisters.
Are those ahead of you above you?
What does the elitist have to say to the egalitarian?
The egalitarian to the elitist?
And what is more important than being quotable?
But what I should do is not the same as what you should do,
says the tyrant, and the anti-tyrant.
No one advised me on my advertisements.
I will not study you to determine what you want.
Meanwhile, everyone is content to write a masterpiece.
Remember when wealth used to (sometimes) produce nobility?
What a story!  Now the rich are the worst we've got, the crassest.
One we need to shame more often:  the scorner.
Are you as good as but other?  Are you better, better than?
Shall I pass by without acknowledging you?
The pretense that we share a language does so much good,
does so much harm.
Much of life is learning to wait faster.
What is to be done with the perpetrator is a question
low on the list of questions most worth spending
my time trying to answer.
When they tell you long enough that they can't handle the truth,
you begin to wonder if they shouldn't be trusted with it.
I love artificial intelligence but won't tolerate an artificial sweetener.
Look, and judge.  It is better to be wrong than to stand with your hand
over your eyes refusing to speak.
The most unattractive thing in someone is their exercise of bad judgment.
These people who are as wrong as Hitler, as wrong as Mao.
The refusal to embrace cliche is a cliche.
I will change your life with a comma.
The set of what I can do will always be smaller than
the set of what can be done.
I move like a pen,
leaving marks intentional and accidental
that others interpret as history.
Circle your favorite line in this poem.
Cross out the one you least like or don't get.
Then read them together, out loud, three times.
This is, for you, the poem's poem,
the core, the heart, the gist, the takeaway.
Transgression is terrible, revelatory,
empowering, and/or hilarious.
If only I'd been given the power to destroy
those who destroy what they can't tolerate.
There are those who try so hard to make it.
And there are those who try so hard
to make it look effortless.
Riding in a wheelbarrow of rambutans,
a calamansi carriage.
(I have always wanted to say eelgrass
but have lacked the occasion.)
I shall take your assertion into consideration.
But I'll tell you right now:
your ordinary is my impossible.
The interesting, the endearing, the adoring—
which is harder to resist?
And why resist them? you cry out,
puzzled, a little offended,
but you will learn.  You will be instructed.
The one debt we rarely repay
is the one we owe ourselves.
(When I speak of the exotic, I am, of course,
referring only to what seems exotic to me.)
You dream of an epic life
but are made to settle for a haiku.
Maybe we should pay more attention
to what a thing does than to what we decide it means?
Who is willing to do things differently
than they have always done them?
Please introduce yourself.
¡Viva la libertad, carajo!