Your Remaining Minutes

What advantage lies in certainty of doom?

It didn’t make you love me more, or longer

To know that we were running out of room:

In fact it just made all the stronger

Your need to sample joy in other flavors.

We owe ourselves, each one, to discover

Those pieces of the world our being savors

Most, in work, and art, and place, and lover,

In the most efficient way. I get it now.

Too late I see that time is running late.

You’re looking at your phone: “Already? Wow!

There’s someone coming by for me at eight.”

I wish I could, but nothing’s harder than

Adding minutes to this Provider’s plan.

The Tourist

The campanile on the cemetery hill is ringing the Ave Maria.

Too bad you’re not Catholic, or Christian, or religious, or human.

The women in this town have put up with so much shit,

They aren’t impressed by sympathetic tourists

Like you. Try the famous local dish, sir, a sort of meatball made of fish,

Then go and tweet about it from home.