COURSE OBJECTIVES

to locate
a 19-year-old voluptuous beauty
who is into funky poetry
and moderately married
literature professors with thinning gray hair;

to fix oneself
with a booster of infatuation
like cortisone directly into
the place where it chronically hurts;

to put a little distance,
in the form of an impressionable devotee,
between the 50-something failed poet
and his rapidly approaching eternal death;

to strike a long wooden marriage
against the flint of a new flirtation,
smell the sulfur, feel the sizzle,
know the lightning has selected me
to carry its torch.