The big-voice flashers.
Wings of metal and night.

“Work shall set you free:” a sensible sentiment:
Marx would agree: Freud would give his assent:
Yet take those words and put them on a sign

I walk into the men’s room at LaGuardia Airport
And the guy standing next to me zipping his fly
Has been dead for thirteen years. I know because
He was one of my professors in graduate school.

Sir Winston Churchill advised against suicide
“Especially when you may live to regret it.”
After an endless faculty meeting at Princeton,

Unable to distinguish between flying and falling
With a feeling of splendid contempt and with a strange loving longing 
In my eyes, I look up at the helicopter that was lately  my home 

No gentle way of breaking the news: you turn on the TV 
And see the rocket’s red glare: the capsule explodes, 
The astronauts tumble down, and the anchorpeople 

They're calling old people seniors
short for senior citizens but it's as though
they're still in college and can look forward

The stars have gone north, abandoning the city
For this wilderness that is mine, if only for a time,
Long enough to learn the language of the leaves before

In my younger and more existential days, the most innocuous of phrases—the ubiquitous “how are you,” for example—would cause rockets of nausea to crash in my belly. There was a time, to be sure, when I could answer “fine” with the best of them. Daily vomiting rapidly cured me of that. 

And if the mortally wounded warrior revives, and if
      his after-dinner pipe leads the drowsy sinner
to cast a long loving look at the cello in the corner