On the New York-Hawley Bus
1.
Life is too short
for anyone but a shallow fool
to think this qualifies as a poem
2.
Life is too short
for me to waste another second
on these paltry lines.
3.
Life is too short
for me to begin describing its bewildering
and sometimes beautiful complexities.
4.
Life is too short
and so is this poem.
5.
Life is too short
except when it isn't.
6.
Life is too short.
Lights glowing
from a rural gas station.
7.
Life is too short, oh.
Nothing to do about it.
Write lots of poems.
8.
Life is too short
when you turn around to look behind
and in the other direction, too.
9.
Life is too short
for us to make up
for all the years
that went by
before we met
(1990, Milan)
but we can
certainly try!
10.
Life is too short
to let yourself be seduced
by fashionable turns of phrase
that would leave
a posthumous reader cold.
OK, but what are you going to put in their place?
11.
Life is too short
to worry about exactly how short it will be.
12.
Life is too short
to ever exhaust
the stock of clichés.
13.
Contra Oscar Wilde and Storm Jameson
Life is too short
not to get seriously into the art of stuffing mushrooms.
14.
For Brian Eno, who once said "Life is too short to listen to records"
Life is too short
to pay attention
to the dicta
of jaded pop stars.
15.
Life is too short:
South Africa 42.73
Malawi 41.70
Sierra Leone 40.22
Zambia 40.03
Mozambique 39.82
Liberia 39.65
Angola 38.62
Lesotho 34.40
Botswana 33.74
Swaziland 32.62