It's an interesting exercise to look at your stack of published poems and determine which the very cream of the crop are. For example, here are the poems from Torched Verse Ends that I would (as of right now) want to put into a "Selected Poems," should I ever be lucky enough to achieve that level. These poems represent about a quarter of the book.

Hayman Wildfire Set by Forest Service Worker
Phoenix, Colorado
Crestone Conglomerate
Bad Naturelover
From the Margins
We Never Did Anything
52 Pickup Lines
Commencement Address Penned on a Bar Napkin
Cushion
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory 3
Clockwork
Deathmatch Mode
Sturgeon's Law
If It Bleeds, It Leads
So You Want a Worker

Only about a half-dozen of those were truly easy to pick, and there were several I agonized over leaving out. I often do the same sort of winnowing process when I read other books of poems as well. You can tell I really love a book when it's simply not feasible for me to trim them into a selected/anthology that way.

Here's one more of the poems as a sample for your enjoyment:


Commencement Address Penned on a Bar Napkin

Assemblage of loose limbs besodden on Alumni Lawn
sprayed evergreen for your parents, in whose wake
live-oak leaves quake as irises plant in front, your dream
of the organic chemistry final administered by a monkey
benzene ring will never drain, unlike a bottle of bourbon.
Even if Java Man was a coffee-mad, knife-happy gibbon
buried under floorboards, he graduated before some
of your cousins. You, music major: does saying Handel’s
Surprise Symphony surprise the hell out of Haydn
in bed? Oh, this mid-May humidity misses Empedocles
and his ability to assemble cumulonimbi. Drill Holbein
through your skull, and you too can paint the pants on
Henry VIII iamb iamb while he wrestles France’s Francis
on the Gold of the Field of Cloth and names a blank
framed paper after you. Rum comes from a great tumult
and soon returns to one. I have wasted my education.

(Originally published in Barn Owl Review)