two life-summarizing poems, not by me

Delinquent Missive

Before David Ricardo stabbed his daddy
sixteen times with a fork -- Once
for every year of my fuckwad life -- he'd long
showed signs of being bent.
In school, he got no valentine nor birthday
cake embellished with his name.
On Halloween, a towel tied around his neck
was all he had to be a hero with.
He spat in the punchbowl and smelled like a foot.
His forehead was a ledge
he leered beneath. When I was sent to tutor him
in geometry, so he might leave
(at last) ninth grade, he sat running pencil lead
beneath his nails.
If radiance shone from those mudhole eyes,
I missed it. Thanks, David
for your fine slang. You called my postulates
post holes; your mom endured
ferocious of the liver. Plus you ignored--
when I saw you wave at lunch --
my flinch. Maybe by now you're ectoplasm,
or the zillionth winner of the Texas
death penalty sweepstakes. Or you occupy
a locked room with a small
round window held fast by rivets, through which
you are watched. But I hope
some organism drew your care -- orchid
or cockroach even, some inmate
in a wheelchair whose steak you had to cut
since he lacked hands.
In this way, the unbudgeable stone
that plugged the tomb hole
in your chest could roll back, and in your sad
slit eyes could blaze
that star adored by its maker.

----- Mary Karr

You Want a Social Life, With Friends

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life as well.
To work hard every day. What's true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn't time enough, my friends--
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends--
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day's end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But hardly writes anything at all.

----- Kenneth Koch