since you’ve always wanted
to know I am going to admit that i never like Shakespeare.
        Browning, the
Bronte sisters,
Tolstoy, baseball, summers on the shore, arm-
wrestling, hockey, Thomas mann, Vivaldi, Winston Churchill,
        Dudley
Moore, free verse,
pizza, bowling, the Olympic Games, the Three Stooges, the
        Marx
Brothers, Ives, Al Jolson, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Mickey
Mouse, basketball,
fathers, mothers, cousins, wives, shack jobs (although preferable
to the former), 
and I don’t like the Nutcracker Suite, the Academy Awards,
        Hawthorne,
Melville, pumpkin pie, New Year’s Eve, Christmas, Labor Day,
        the
Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Good Friday, The Who,
Bacon, Dr. Spock, Blackstone and Berlioz, Franz
Liszt, pantyhose,
lice, fleas, goldfish, crabs, spiders, war
heroes, space flights, camels (I don’t trust camels) or the
Bible,
Updike, Erica Jong, Corso, bartenders, fruit flies, Jane
Fonda,
churches, weddings, birthdays, newscasts, watch
dogs, .22 rifles, Henry
Fonda
and all the women who should have loved me but
didn’t and
the first day of Spring and the
last
and the first line of this poem
and this one
that you’re reading
now.