October 16, 2004
Light verse Just because it's poetry doesn't mean it has to be serious...
...whether it's short, punny, famous, slightly less famous, elaborately conceived, Shakespearean, blokey, self-parodying, randomly generated, exhaustive, pithy, commercial, biographical, philosophical, or generally clerihewical.
So what's your favorite light verse?
There once was a man from Nantucket ...
I always look forward to Calvin Trillin's poems in the Nation.
Believe Ogden Nash was an excellent poet who happened to write light verse.
Complete fool about puns, no discrimination at all, and if they crop up in a poem, so much the better.
Glad to see the link to Light Quarterly.
there once was a mob full of apes
who wanted to talk, joke and gape
but long term discourse
not off menu but forced
to exodize/balkanize/escape
...
The task I dread; dare I to leave
Of humble prose the shore,
and put to sea? a dangerous sea?
What throngs have sunk before!
How proud the poet's billow swells!
The God! the God! his boast:
A boast how vain! What wrecks abound!
Dead bards stench every coast.
-- Edward Young, Resignation, Part I
Thus:
A warning dire
if ye aspire
to climb on Pegasus!
I am Raftery the poet,
Full of hope and love,
My eyes without sight,
My mind without torment,
Going west on my journey
By the light of my heart,
Tired and weary
To the end of the road.
Behold me now
With my back to a wall,
Playing music
To empty pockets.
-- Anthony Raftery, "I Am Raftery", trans James Stephens
I once told Frieda Hughes that poetry was dead. She wasn't amused.
She wasn't amused.
Should she have been?
Why won't folk let us simply
bee?
See how my daisy's fumbled by
a passing butterfly.
Onion
The smoothness of onions infuriates him
so like the skin of women or their expensive clothes
and the striptease of onions, which is also a disappearing act.
He says he is searching for the ultimate nakedness
but when he finds that thin green seed
that negligible sprout of a heart
we could have told him he'sd only be disappointed.
Meanwhile the onion has been hacked to bits
and he's weeping in the kitchen most unromantic tears.
-- Katha Pollittt
In Extremis
I saw my toes the other day.
I hadn't looked at them for months.
Indeed they might have passed away.
And yet they were my best friends once.
When I was small I knew them well.
I counted on them up to ten
And put them in mouth to tell
The larger from the lesser. Then
I loved them better than my ears,
My elbows, adenoids, and heart.
But with the swelling of the years
We drifted, toes and I, apart.
Now, gnarled and pale, each said, j'accuse!__
I hid them quickly in my shoes.
--John Updike
There was a young lady of Ryde,
Who ate some green apples and died;
The apples fermented
Inside the lamented,
And made cider inside her inside.
-- Anon.
Madame Dill grew very ill
and nothing will improve her,
until she sees The Tuileries
and waddles through the Louvre.
***********
Here lies Les Moore,
Four shots from a forty-four:
No Les,
No Moore.
-- Anon.</i>
THE FIREFLY
Nash (again)
This firefly ... he seems a wee bittie short, BlueHorse.
Somebody stole
my</strike. Mr. Nash's pom!!
THE FIREFLY
The firefly's flame Is something for which science has no name
I can think of nothing eerier
Than flying around with an unidentified glow on a
person's posteerier.
Sorry Bees, no bees. But you're a glowing bee to me!
Bitcherel
You ask what I think of your new acquisition
and since we are now to be 'friends'
I'll try to the full to cement my position
with honesty. Dear -- it depends.
It depends upon taste, which must not be disputed,
for which of us does understand
why some like their furnishings pallid and muted
their cookery wholesome, but bland?
There isn't a law that a face should have features,
it's just that they generally do.
God couldn't give colour to all of his creatures
and only gave wit to a few.
I'm sure she has qualities, much underrated,
that compensate amply for this,
along with a charm that is so understated
it's easy for people to miss.
And if there are some who choose clothing to flatter
what beauties they think they possess,
when what's underneath has no shape, does it matter
if there is no shape to the dress?
It's not that I think she is boring, precisely,
that isn't the word I would choose;
I know there are men who like girls who talk nicely
and always wear sensible shoes.
It's not that I think she is vapid and silly,
it's not that her voice makes me wince,
but -- chili con carne without any chili
is only a plateful of mince.
-- Eleanor Brown
(transcribed from memory, because I seem to have lost the anthology grr - profound apologies to Ms Brown if I'm mispunctuating)
rainswept sky:
time to salute
the nation of daffodils
taunting the gloom
under lichened boughs
((((((
(a host of golden bananas for ye)
Canning Time
(Dedicated to all who can)
Let housewives sing the woes of Spring
And cleaning house in rhyme --
There's nothing quite so hard to me,
There's nothing that I hate to see
Like canning time; like canning time.
When I survey the long array
Of empty cans and jars
To be filled with beans and corn,
I almost wish I had been born
on far-off Mars; on far-off Mars.
The woods invite and mountain height
With crag and peak sublime --
But peeling fruit both soon and late
Is my unalterable fate
In canning time; in canning time.
With finished task, my neigbours ask,
"How many cans have you?"
And then I almost burst with pride,
My answer cannot be denied,
"Four hundred jars and forty-two."
-- Emma Ingold Bost
ARTISTRY Frances Creighton Murray (1888-1982)
Moonlight sheen on fields of snow
Purpled hills in sunset’s glow
Lovely scenes that artists know!
Curves and symmetry of line
Statues carved in marble fine
Seem to sculptors quite divine.
Though I give it soul and heart
By comparison, - my art
Seems mundane and far apart.
Some may scoff at it maybe
Look at me quite pityingly
When I call it artistry!
Glasses filled with peach and cherry
Quince and apple, mint, strawberry,
Rows and rows to tempt the weary.
Sunlight gleams on amber, blue,
Purple, crimson every hue,
Shining there, for all to view.
Is my offering artistry?
So it really seems to me.
The gravest fish is an oyster,
The gravest bird is an owl,
The gravest beast is an ass,
And the gravest man is a fule.
-- another anonymous Scot
kewl follow-up, fish tick
I always want to write fish stick--forgive me in advance if I do
'Tis, indeed. And mothninja's contribution above is also a fine one.
The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there,
And warmly debated the matter;
The orthodox said it came from the air,
And the heretics said from the platter.
-- Anon
Caterpillar
The feet of the
Caterpillar
Do not patter
As he passes
Like the clever
Quick paws
Of the squirrel,
But they ripple,
Stepping one pair
After another
And another,
And they travel
With his whole
Long caravan
Of bristles
Down the brown
Twig, to a
Greener midummer
Dinner.
-- Valerie Worth
This one's for you, Bees, so that you will know your ferocious brothers:
BEES
(With apologies to Joyce Kilmer)
I think that I shall never see
A bug more frightening than a bee.
A bee whose stinger will impose
Fierce pain to arm or leg or nose;
A bee whose potent wretched venom
Will torment folks who get it in 'em;
A bee that always works for hours
Purloining nectar from our flowers;
Upon whose head reside five eyes;
Who stabs its victim and then dies.
To me it seems a little funny
That only bees can make pure honey.
Copyright © 1996 Ruth Gillis
Our Bees is not an evil bug
I'd like to give our Bees a hug.
He's awful sweet, like clover honey
And writes us poems that are so funny.
OOO and XXX
to the Bees
honeybees thrive
inside a hive
the queen lays eggs
which are taken care of
by her sisters
worker bees who make the honey
or the cells of wax
or fly their wings to shreds
or fight off alien attackers
the drone
only works once
otherwise he's free to go or come
he may as well write poetry
until the time he flies
in pursuit of a queen
whom he mates
and thereby dies
his final end
comes in the skies
I wrote this when I was in 5th grade:
Catfishes are vicious
when you get them on a hook.
Catfishes are vicious
when they're baked, not cooked.
There are other kinds of vicious fishes,
but the most vicious are catfishes.
*applauds*
*joins in applause*
This was my first foray into monkey (catfish?) poetry. I am thrilled to be so welcomed!
*embraces fellow poet warmly*
The more the merrier, naturesgreatest -- if it's fun for you, it's fun for us.
How the Pope is Chosen
Any poodle under ten inches high is a toy.
Almost always a toy is an imitation
of something grown-ups use.
Popes with unclipped hair are called corded popes.
If a Pope's hair is allowed to grow unchecked,
it becomes extremely long and twists
into long strands that look like ropes.
When it is shorter it is tightly curled.
Popes are very intelligent.
There are three different sizes.
The largest are called standard Popes.
The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes.
I could go on like this, I could say:
"He is a squarely built Pope, neat,
well-proportioned, with an alert stance
and an expression of bright curiosity,"
but I won't. After a poodle dies
all the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-Eleven.
They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up
and then he's the new Pope.
He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone,
day and night in all kinds of weather.
The new Pope chooses the name he will use as Pope,
like "Wild Bill" or "Buffalo Bill."
He wears red shoes with a cross embroidered on the front.
Most Popes are called "Babe" because
growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun.
All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger,
but sometimes things happen to make them unhappy.
They have to go to the bathroom by themselves,
and they spend almost all of their time sleeping.
Parents seem to be incapable of helping their little popes grow up.
Fathers tell them over and over again not to lean out of windows,
but the sky is full of them.
It looks as if they are just taking it easy,
but they are learning something else.
What, we don't know, because we are not like them.
We can't even dress like them.
We are like red bugs or mites compared to them.
We think we are having a good time cutting cartoons out of the paper,
but really we are eating crumbs out of their hands.
We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes.
When a Pope is ready to come into the world,
we try to sing a song, but the words do not fit the music too well.
Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us.
They open their mouths at regular intervals.
They are continually grinding up pieces of the cross
and spitting them out. Black flies cling to their lips.
Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream
and a puppy clip. Eyebrows are a protection
when the Pope must plunge through dense underbrush
in search of a sheep.
-- James Tate
Whoa, Mothninja. That was a fantastic poem.
I am so going to go looking for one of my silly poems now!
The Businessman farts and charges you
for spreading his wealth
Politicians fart a lot -
it’s called parliamentary debate
Kids fart and don’t care
Women never fart
or if they do, everyone stares
and they say
“it must have been the chair”
Men fart loudly and exclaim
“better out than in”
for men, farting is a responsibility
and certainly not a sin
If you have a dog
it will get blamed for all SBDs
Musicians tune their farts.
After eating beans and rice,
they perform anal arias
and sphincter symphonies
The conductor uses his wand
to waft his odour
over to the orchestra
causing one wag to remark
‘so, does that mean we are playing
an unfinished movement?’
Artists fart then create a meaning for it.
Critics smell perfume, when its really just a fart,
the public says it all stinks and asks why
it should pay for a natural process.
Performance Artists fart soliloquoys
and pronounce “I am a fartist.”
Marketing gurus bottle any old fart
and tell you it’s “NEW and IMPROVED”
with brand new “Rectal Revele Technology tm”
Economists can tell you about the suppply,
but cannot work out the demand for farts
One of the Lumiere brothers...
(you know those guys who invented the ballon)
well, one of them he filled one whole
with one of his farts
upon smelling the odour he said
“this sure smells better than all those dead dogs
but I might have to think about changing the process
and burning some well-seasoned logs instead”.
Some people kick up a stink
about the stink of others,
pretending that we should be ashamed
of a process that is natural.
They don’t stop and think
that we’re all sisters and brothers
in one big farting International
I second bees too, I welcome these poetic forays.
If I was not such a slothful creature I would have remembered to post this sooner.
Hurray, hurray,
It's the first of May!
Hedgerow fucking
begins today.
[tradtional, British]
There was an Old Derry down Derry, who loved to see little folks merry;
So he made them a book, and with laughter they shook at the fun of that Derry down Derry.
Edward Lear
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to the silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek....
--Naomi Shihab Nye, from "Famous"
And one by Marianne Moore:
If you will tell me why the fen
appears impassable, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it if I try.
Bees, does this sound like your house?
Big Dog, Little Dog
By Wyatt Prunty
The one two times the other's size,
Eight inches closer to the Master's hand,
Twelve pounds more instrumental through the door,
Was also twice as given unto doubt:
Would there be more for her? Was she best loved?
Would Alpha always have her dish filled first?
Because the Smaller's mouth took longer with
Her food, the Big was certain she got less,
Until desire became a kind of grief,
And in despond she circled, sighed, then clumped
Down in the corner where her sorrowful eyes
Bathed over a vision of indifferent feet.
How turn such thinking back to happiness?
I broke the food the way we're taught with bread,
Scattering the pieces in all the likely
And unlikely places possible,
So now she had to hunt to eat, to live,
Till the floors ran in an ecstasy of snuffling.
I broke the object to its lesser parts,
Dividing each from each so there seemed more,
(Desire needs lack as much as what's desired).
Then labor filled her want with multitudes
Of smaller bites, hard swallowing, a bliss
Of quick-jawed work that lived for hunger.
Meanwhile, the Little Dog ate without noticing.
Well, I like the poem very much, but no...the dachshund is capable of inhaling food twenty or thirty times faster than the collie.
Collies are odd dogs -- I have never had a purebred that was what ye'd call an eager eater -- they have to be cosseted into accepting food. No kidding.
Whereas the dachshund is more like a piranha -- any old thing in her dish -- zap! and its gone. That fast.
Skye won't eat if a person is in the same room as her dish. We have to put it down and leave her in solitude for a half hour or so, and then come back and see if it was acceptable.
You may think I am kidding but this is perfectly true.
"The Gofongo", by Spike Milligan (from memory, be kind!)
The Gofongo, if you please,
Is a fish with singing knees.
And a tail that plays
The Spanish clarionet.
He has toes that whistle tunes
And explode like toy balloons.
Hence his many,
Many visits to the vet.
The Gofongo, when he likes,
Swallows jam and rusty bikes,
Orange pips and treacle
Pudding boiled in glue.
He loves chips with rusty nails,
And can swallow iron rails
That is why they cannot keep one in a zoo
But Gofongo as a pet
Would cause panic and regret.
People tried it and were
Nearly driven barmy
For once inside a house
He screams, "I'm a Jewish mouse!"
And he runs away and joins the Arab army!
Heh. And hurray for Mr Milligan
who knew the value of a silly one!
Night
Dances beautifully
and has great desires.
Seeks the road,
Weeps in the woods,
Is killed by dawn, fever,
And the rooster.
-- Adam Zagajewski
Hedgerow fucking
begins today.
Er- is that of hedgerows or in them? A prickly business, in either case. Doubly so, perhaps.
Ach tick, that was a coupla weeks ago. Coming up is Queen Vickie's birthday (or the May two-four weekend). We'll not only be able have nookie in the woods but lotsa beer to go with it ;~0
Verra kind of ye to offer, I'm sure. I'll stick to Duggan's Dew an' noon of ye're wookies, thanks.
Duggan's Dew -- or Dewar?
heard today a gent
say northeren
when it was clear
he meant northern
my mind, like a butterfly
went flitting
off to southeren
I boxed the compass
and I'm still grinning
for my dad
always said
fillum for film
and any time he had to say
my brother John
would turn it somehow softer --
my brother Chaw-wun
The Table and The Chair
Edward Lear
Said the Table to the Chair,
'You can hardly be aware,
How I suffer from the heat,
And from chilblains on my feet!
If we took a little walk,
We might have a little talk!
Pray let us take the air!'
Said the Table to the Chair.
Said the Chair to the table,
'Now you know we are not able!
How foolishly you talk,
When you know we cannot walk!'
Said the Table with a sigh,
'It can do no harm to try,
I've as many legs as you,
Why can't we walk on two?'
So they both went slowly down,
And walked about the town
With a cheerful bumpy sound,
As they toddled round and round.
And everybody cried,
As they hastened to their side,
'See! the Table and the Chair
Have come out to take the air!'
But in going down an alley,
To a castle in a valley,
They completely lost their way,
And wandered all the day,
Till, to see them safely back,
They paid a Ducky-quack,
And a Beetle, and a Mouse,
Who took them to their house.
Then they whispered to each other,
'O delightful little brother!
What a lovely walk we've taken!
Let us dine on Beans and Bacon!'
So the Ducky and the leetle
Browny-Mousy and the Beetle
Dined and danced upon their heads
Till they toddled to their beds.
There's too many kids in this tub.
Too many elbows to scrub.
I just washed a behind
that I'm sure wasn't mine,
There's too many kids in this tub.
-- Shel Silverstein
When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh! the doxy, over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale.
The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,
With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!
Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;
For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.
The lark, that tirra-lira chants,
With heigh! with heigh! the thrush and the jay,
Are summer songs for me and my aunts,
While we lie tumbling in the hay.
-- William Shakespeare
For Guess Who:
Funny Poems CategorySubmit Your PoemIncome From PoetrySerch For A Poem
Introduction
When organ meats were very cheap
My frugal mother used to keep,
For Crepe D'Chine, our "tomless" kitty,
A chopped-up stash. It kept him pretty.
One day a very British guy,
A friend of Dad's from work, came by.
Crepe approved, so when he sat,
Zap! The chap's lap was full of cat
Before Purina
"Lovely cat," murmured our English guest,
Stroking Crepie's side.
"What do you feed him, if I might ask?"
"Beef heart," my mother replied.
"Sounds frightfully insubstantial,"
Opined the British gent,
"Unless, of course, the bee were HUGE,
And EXTREMELY flatulent!"
Copyright; Tad Lawson
I wrote a good omelet...and ate a hot poem...
after loving you
Buttoned my car...and drove my coat home...in the rain...
after loving you
I goed on red...and stopped on green...floating somewhere in beween...
being here and being there...
after loving you
I rolled my bed...turned down my hair....slightly confused but...I don't care...
Laid out my teeth...and gargled my gown...then I stood...and laid me down...
to sleep...
after loving you
--Nikki Giovanni, "I Wrote a Good Omelet"
Cathryn Essinger
from My Dog Does Not Read Plato.
The Man Next Door Is Teaching His Dog to Drive
It all began when he came out one morning
and found the dog waiting for him behind the wheel.
He thought she looked pretty good sitting there,
so he started taking her into town with him
just so she could get a feel for the road.
They have made a few turns through the field,
him sitting beside her, his foot on the accelerator,
her muzzle on the wheel. Now they are practicing
going up and down the lane with him whispering
encouragement in her silky ear. She is a handsome
dog with long ears and a speckled muzzle and he
is a good teacher. Now my wife, Millie, he says,
she was always too timid on the road, but don't you
be afraid to let people know that you are there.
The dog seems to be thinking about this seriously.
Braking, however, is still a problem, but he is building
a mouthpiece which he hopes to attach to the steering
column, and when he upgrades to one of those new
Sports Utility Vehicles with the remote ignition device,
he will have solved the key and the lock problem.
Although he has not yet let her drive into town,
he thinks she will be ready sometime next month,
and when his eyes get bad and her hip dysplasia
gets worse, he thinks this will come in real handy.
Under-cur-ents in that one -- is this dog always strictly canine and not, at least in some lines, a human person leading a dog's life?
Or, of course, both.</small></small>
...
You survived because you were the first.
You survived because you were the last.
Because you were alone. Because of people.
Because you turned left. Because you turned right.
Because rain fell. Because a shadow fell.
Because sunny weather prevailed.
Luckily there was a wood.
Luckily there were no trees.
Luckily there was a rail, a book, a beam, a brake,
a frame, a bend, a millimeter, a second.
Luckily a straw was floating on the surface.
Thanks to, because, and yet, in spite of.
What would have happened had not a hand, a foot,
by a step, a hairsbreadth
by sheer coincidence.
So, you're here! Straight from a moment still ajar?
The net had one eyehole, and you got through it?
There's no end to my wonder, my silence.
Listen
how fast your heart beats in me.
-- Wyslawa Szymborska, from "There But for the Grace"
Wonderful, bees. Thank you.
For benefit of new monkeys: ... a lowering glance back at ancient monkeyfilter history...
For 'tis the golden month
of June
and Urine Day
is coming
soon.
On June 16, 2004, monkeyfilter, like creaking snowpack on a steep slope, abruptly slid downhill....
And I deem it all started here.
June 16th is my birthday. Hurrah!
Let a thousand golden verses shower down upon us
Each shining out like a shaft of gold
When all about is dark.
It was one of Wilde's.
Dang, beeswacky- I can't get the link.
Ne'er mind- works when you de-post it. :-)
Ha, dng, mine's the tenth, and I'm going to open all the presents first!
*crams cake in mouth with both hands
Sorry about the extraneous post in the URL, tick -- here's a corrected version.
To the Spider in the Crevice Behind the Toilet Door
i have left you four flies
three are in the freezer nezt to the joint of beed
the other is wrapped in christmas paper
tied with a pink ribbon
beside the ironing table in the hall
should you need to contact me
in an emergency
the number's in the book
by the telephone
p.s. i love you
-- Janet Sutherland
When the rich pass proudly by
on big, smooth horses
I feel foolish
riding my scrawny donkey.
I feel much better
when we overtake
a bundle of sticks
riding a bony man.
-- Wang Fan-Chih, trans Sam Hamill
There was a young lady … tut, tut!
So you think that you're in for some smut?
Some five-line crescendo
Of lewd innuendo?
Well, you're wrong. This is anything but.
—Stanley J. Sharpless
After weeks of watching the roof leak
I fixed it tonight
by moving a single board.
--Gary Snider, from "Hitch Haiku"
=Snyder
The Bear, the Fire, and the Snow
"I live in fear of the snow," said the bear.
"Whenever it's here, be sure I'll be there.
Oh, the pain and the cold,
When one's bearish and old.
I live in fear of the cold."
"I live in fear of the fire," said the snow.
"Whenever it comes then it's time I must go.
With its yellow lick flames
Leaping higher and higher,
I live in fear of the fire."
"I live in fear of the river," said the fire.
"It can drown all my flames any time it desires,
And the thought of the wet
Makes me sputter and shiver.
I live in fear of the river."
"I live in fear of the bear," said the river.
"It can lap me right up, don't you know?"
While a mile away
You can hear the bear say,
"I live in fear of the snow."
--Shel Silverstein
Hooray for Shel!
The Boss
Skilled to pull wires, he baffles Nature's hope,
Who sure intended him to stretch a rope.
-- James Russell Lowell
Another Unfortunate Choice
I think I am in love with A.E. Housman,
Which puts me in a worse-than-usual fix.
No woman ever stood a chance with Housman
And he's been dead since 1936.
-- Wendy Cope
A Poem Just for Me
Where am I now when I need me
Suddenly where have I gone?
I'm so alone here without me
Tell me please what have I done?
Once I did most things together
I went for walks hand in hand
I shared my life so completely
I met my every demand
Tell me I'll come back tomorrow
I'll keep my arms open wide
Tell me that I'll never leave me
My place is here at my side
Maybe I've simply mislaid me
Like an umbrella or key
So until the day that I come my way
Here is a poem just for me.
-- Roger McGough
My Aunt Raises Violets from Africa"
Janice Moore Fuller
All those loose threads
from her sewing, trailing
off bobbins toward Chattanooga,
Nashville, Myrtle Beach, Niagara
Falls. She snapped them at the hem
with her teeth, those worn
hitching posts.
She never learned to drive.
Didn't leave Grandma's
yard for thirty years.
Her Singer just hummed.
She never stopped wearing
that engagement ring he gave her at twenty,
measuring time by how deep
it sank into her finger
even after he died, still her fiancé,
an old man living with his mother.
We only whispered his name.
At night, after the Bible verses,
she'd coat herself with vapor rub,
thick and Vicks blue,
then dial up the DJ
who knew her voice,
yearning for the smooth of Englebert
soothing her into bed
back to back with Grandma.
When I spent the night,
we'd tend the violets
lined like bassinets
along the north:
double lavenders, crystal
stars, angel blues, pink
persuasion. So careful.
We never touched their velvet
not even the undersides.
We just turned them each day,
their faces straining
toward the sun.
Hello, o poetry friends!
*bows to beeswacky*
*lifts hat to bluehorse*
Blow
Her skirt was lifted by the gale;
When I with gesture deft,
Essayed to stay her frisky sail
She luffed, and laughed, and left.
--Paul Humphrey
Heh!
Hello yourself, StoryBored.
From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it's like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it's like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it's like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions...
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, it's like a trick;
and when the trick begins, it's like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it's like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.
-- Alive Oswald, "Wedding"
What We Need
David Budbill
The Emperor,
his bullies
and henchmen
terrorize the world
every day,
which is why
every day
we need
a little poem
of kindness,
a small song
of peace
a brief moment
of joy.
Bless ye, GramMa
Nice segue into a fine poem, bees!
Hoorary for poetry!
*does the poetry monkey dance*
The Uncertainty of the Poet
I am a poet.
I am very fond of bananas.
I am bananas.
I am very fond of a poet.
I am a poet of bananas.
I am very fond,
A fond poet of 'I am, I am' -
Very bananas,
Fond of 'Am I bananas?
Am I?' - a very poet.
Bananas of a poet!
Am I fond? Am I very?
Poet bananas! I am.
I am fond of a 'very.'
I am of very fond bananas.
Am I a poet?
-- Wendy Cope (again - but I thought this one was particularly appropriate...)
More along the same lines...
---
An Infinite Number Of Monkeys
After all the Shakespeare, the book
of poems they type is the saddest
in history.
But before they can finish it,
they have to wait for that Someone
who is always
looking to look away. Only then
can they strike the million
keys that spell
humiliation and grief, which are
the great subjects of Monkey
Literature
and not, as some people still
believe, the banana
and the tire.
Ronald Koertge
very nice!!
many ripe bananas to yer
Fine poems!
*makes necklace out of ripe bananas*
*hands it to Bees*
Ah thank ye for the kind welcome!
Welcome to all lovers of poetry!
I wasn't in this poem,
only gleaming pure pools,
the lizard's tiny eye, the wind
and the sounds of a harmonica
pressed to not my lips.
--Adam Zagajewski. "I wasn't in this poem".
The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do:
My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two.
But oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest,
The brains in my head and the heart in my breast.
O grant me the ease that is grantesd so free,
The birthright of multitudes, give it to me,
That relish their victuals and rest on their bed
With flint in the bosom and guts in the head.
--A. E. Housman, "The stars have not dealt"
=granted
the samurai
he would not cry
though he had to wear
a nekutai
oh
oh
oh
It hurts.
It hurts.
BEES, THAT IS SO BAD!
I would have thought that was beneath you. Obviously, you have no shame.
BlueHorse, it's not really a pun. That is how "necktie" is transliterated in Japanese.
Heh.
But it is also true I have no shame when it comes to puns.
The New Dog
Into the gravity of my life,
the serious ceremonies
of polish and paper
and pen, has come
this manic animal
whose innocent disruptions
make nonsense
of my old simplicities --
as if I needed him
tp prove again that after
all the careful planning,
anything can happen.
-- Linda Pastan
A couple by Louise Gluck:
The Butterfly
Look, a butterfly. Did you make a wish?
You don't wish on butterflies.
You do so. Did you make one?
Yes.
It doesn't count.
The Wish
Remember that time you made the wish?
I make a lot of wishes.
The time I lied to you
about the butterfly. I always wondered
what you wished for.
What do you think I wished for?
I don't know, That I'd come back,
that we'd somehow be together in the end.
I wished for what I always wish for.
I wished for another poem.
'Nedra, thanks for your info.
nekutai I likes that word.
Great poems, bees.
Questionnaire
What do you consider your mission in life?
I am an absolutely useless human being.
What are your political convictions?
What we have now is fine. The opposition
to what we have now is fine. One ought to be
able to imagina a third -- but what?
Your opinion on religion, if any?
The same as my opinion on music, namely only
he who is truly unmusical can be musical.
What do you look for in people? My relationships
have unfortunately little or no constancy.
What do you look for in literature? Philosophic depth?
Breadth or height? Epic? Lyric?
I look for the perfect circle.
What is the most beautiful thing you know of?
Birds in the cemetaries, butterflies on battlefields,
something in between. I really don't know.
Your favorite hobby? I have no hobby.
Your favorite sin? Onanism.
And to conclude (as briefly as possible):
Why do you write?
I have nothing else to do. Emma Wright?
You make puns, also?
I do make puns, yes.
-- Gunnar Ekelof, trans. Robert Bly
Thank you for that, bees - Ekelöf is grand. I've made an attempt at translating one of my favourites of his that I couldn't find anywhere else, "Sång för att döva smärtan":
Song to dull the pain
Go to the beach, mumbling into the wind
Go to the pebbles on the beach with your despair.
See, there is the water, here is the land:
Reality! You can touch it with your hand.
Pick up a stone from the heavy heart of the world,
Weigh it in your hand and let it fall.
Pick up a stone and throw it in the water,
Let a lifeless memory sink into oblivion...
Do you see now that the beach was a rosary, the trees prayers,
Pray for verdancy, life and happiness, stone by stone:
Songs shall grow in your mouth, stronger than the wind,
And your soul shall bear feelings, deeper than joy.
You shall still the storms in the heart of the world,
You shall plait the lightning into simple wreaths
And when the weight and death of all the stones has been atoned for
You shall go liberated to your abounding calm.
Wow. A new poet to explore! (for me at least)
Whot a bugfest, first Bees, then our Moth.
Thanks, guys.
That's lovely, moth. I'll have to go looking for more -- I have a friend who I think would appreciate "Song to dull the pain".
Wow, thanks bees and moth. Those are good ones.
*applauds*
...and moth that is some rocking translation.
I went to the library to look for some more of his stuff but there was only one volume called "Selected Poems" translated by WH Auden. It was puzzling and not quite as expected.
Sometimes I go about pitying myself
and all the time
I am being carried on great winds across the sky.
-- Anon, [Chippewa], trans. Robert Bly
Spirit Song
spirit in the sky
come down here
right away
bite the world to death
I rise
up to the spirits
magician friends help me
reach the spirits
child child child
spirit
that can bite evil
come to us
and spirit at the bottom of the
earth I'm calling you I
live near you on top
bite our enemies
join your brother from the sky
rach bite an eye out
of evil's face
so it can't see us
--Anon. [Inuit], trans Stephen Berg
=each
Ogden Nash did a pun-ishing little piece on "The Wasp":
The wasp and all his numerous family
I look upon as a major calamity.
He throws open his nest with prodigality,
But I distrust his waspitality.
StoryBored, been digging a bit to see what else of Gunnar Ekelof I could find. Frankly no tranlations as remarkabl;e as the one by Bly above. What I did find is either too long or too awkward to post here. Will keep looking, though.
Thanks Bees. That Auden translation had a long series of what seemed like only vaguely connected verses. The intro said something like it was a series of "beads" in a tale of the Orient. But anyhow nothing like the two great poems you and moth posted. I will continue looking also. Funny but there's almost nothing on the web...
There's this promising website with some poems but it's in Swedish.
The Pigeon Makes His Request
Since it's spring and raining,
could we have a little different expression,
oh owl?
-- Issa, trans Robert Bly
Given the dearth of English Ekelöf goodness, I've been having a crack at translating a couple more - they need more work, but they should hopefully give you a rough idea. They're the first, second and fourth ones on this page off the site that StoryBored linked to. A wee bit of Ekelöf biography: born 1907, died 1968, he published his first anthology, "sent på jorden" ("late on the earth") in 1932, from which the poems below are taken. He studied Oriental languages in London, and spent time in France where he was much influenced by the Modernist art movement, and the surrealist and DaDaist poets, specifically Breton and Eluard. Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' is also quoted as an influence on his early work. He's often referred to as Sweden's first surrealist, although in later life he became fiercely critical of the idea.
A song bedecked with flags*
the morning wakes blue-eyed and the wind opens the window for the sky among white clouds and waving curtains
outside the birds chirp strands of pearls in the budding bushes and the raindrops glisten like pearls in the green grass while the sunshine eloquently lauds the blushing flowers...
and the hands of the trees bless the still daylight that lends everything calm and beauty while silent swallows chase the insect of eternity in the invisible air and the sun plays and sings gold! gold! and all the blue sky in his lungs...
*note: the Swedish flag is yellow and blue
crashing waves
blue are my desires, blue are the sky and the sea's desires
the life of men is too harsh for me, I'm happy amongst the mussels and the seaweed
my shores are the necklace of the sea and the sea breathes slowly and gently rattles its pebbles...
an invisible string quartet plays with colours in the clouds and the sun dies like a swan of light
perhaps someone will give me birds to fly with in the sun's red wake where my phosphorous star shudders
if I wait perhaps someone will change my desires to rockets and let them explode by a faraway cloud
then my blue stars would gently rain down into the red evening...
blue are the stars of my desires, the life of men is too harsh for me
apotheosis
give me poison to die or dreams to live
asceticism will end soon at the gates of the moon that the sun has already blessed
and though left unconsummated by reality the dreams of the dead shall cease lamenting their fate.
father I restore my eye to your heaven like a blue drop in the ocean
the black world no longer bows before palms and psalm singing
but thousand-year-old winds comb the flow'ring* hair of the trees
springs slake the thirst of the invisible wanderer
four cardinal points stand empty around the bier
and the angels' muslin is transformed
as if by magic
into nothing.
*translator's note: this is a classic example of why Swedish-to-English is a bugger to translate, specifically in poetry. The word "utslagna" can mean both "spread-out and loose" when referring to hair, and "in bloom" when referring to trees, which gives this line a beautiful double meaning in Swedish. I've put "flow'ring" in a hope of trying to express both "flowing" and "flowering" but it's far from an ideal solution - it is too old-fashioned for the style of the piece and is useless when read out loud. Anyone else have any good ideas?
I thought for a while and came up with garlanded tresses of the trees which obviously strays a bit but maybe garlands of flowers in the hair suggest trailing and there's the alliteration and assonance of tresses/trees but that might be inappropriate. Nice poems!
Bees:
That Issa is amazing!
Translated by Robert Hass
Hey, sparrow!
out of the way,
Horse is coming.
Naked
on a naked horse
in pouring rain
A noble effort, mothninja! Thank you!
Sometimes in translating a poem ye have to opt for the feel rather than going for just the literal meaning. Otherwise it won't work as a poem in English, although it may be an excellent and faithful word by word translation of the original. And I think producing a poem in Englkish has to be the end object of a good translation. Which means ye have to be prepared to be loose at times, rather than literal in bringing a poem to life.
Of far more concern to me would be knowing whether these pieces were originally written as prose-poems by Ekelof. Few things say 'look here, I am a poem!' as strongly and insistently in English as line breaks. Line breaks let a reader know at a glance if this is poetry or prose. [A prose-poem, if ye allow that to be a legitimate form for a poem, appears as a block of text on the page. Ye can always get an argument going among poets as to whether a prose-poem is actually a poem or not.] So that would be the first thing I'd want to be clear on if I were translating -- what is the form used here? What will be the ideal physical layout in English? Here again, I incline to think ye have to be flecible about form -- the time-honoured, Japanese seventeen-syllable haiku, for example, is often so much better as a poem in English if it isn;t so ponderously presented.
After that, I would consider matters of the language seeming modern or old-fashioned. There is little difference in meaning, if any, between decked and bedecked to represent an object covered with/blooming with flags, for example. You, as translator have to weigh many issues and subtleties in arriving at a final decision. You end up being a poet yourself if you are a good translator, otherwise your poem will fall flat.
I believe translation is more difficult than merely writing a poem in a single language, because ye end up having to balance overt things like meaning as well as nuances and context in two languages, not just one. Is there a sustained metaphor in the original? Look for mnetaphor. Hunt the metaphor, get into its skin. Ask yoursdelf things like what blossoms here? where can a line be made to bloom -- even if the literal meaning of a word or phrase is not blooming, ye may be able to make it do so if ye choose to.
Hope these remarks prove helpful -- if not, please ignore 'em. I don't speak Swedish so can't really be of much help, alas. but I am acutely aware you do possess the English skills to write good poetry, and hope ye keep at it -- I would love to see these again if ye continue working on them. Personally, I have never yet managed a translation of a poem with which I felt completely satisfied.do.
The Door
Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there's
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.
Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog's rummaging.
Maybe you'll see a face,
or an eye,
ot the picture
of a picture.
Go and open the door.
If there's a fog,
it will clear.
Go and open the door.
Even if there's only
the darkness ticking,
Even if thetre's only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing
is there,
go and open the door.
At least
there'll be
a draught.
-- Miroslav Holub, transl Ian Milner.
Thanks Moth for that extra slice of delicious Ekelof! These poems seem to be more like the ones I read in the Auden translation, they have a slight Taoist feel to them. They're more puzzling than the "Song to dull the pain"....
(for some reason the past week's comments made in this thread didn't show up on my sidebar, almost missed this)
Being Boring
"May you live in interesting times,"
--Chinese curse
If you ask me, "What's new?", I have nothing to say,
Except that the garden is growing.
I had a slight cold but it's better today.
I'm content with the way things are going.
Yes, he is the same as he usually is,
Still eating and sleeping and snoring.
I get on with my work. He gets on with his.
I know this is all very boring.
There was drama enough in my turbulent past:
Tears and passion -- I've used up a tankful.
No news is good news, and long may it last,
If nothing much happens, I'm thankful.
A happier cabbage you never did see,
My vegetable spirits are soaring.
If you're after excitement, steer well clear of me.
I want to go on being boring.
I don't go to parties. Well, what are they for
If you don't need to find a new lover?
You drink and you listen and drink a bit more
And you take the next day to recover.
Someone to stay home with was all my desire,
And, now that I've found a new mooring,
I've just one ambition in life: I aspire
To go on and on being boring.
<snmall>--Wendy Cope</small>
Celia Celia
When I am sad and weary
When I think all hope has gone
When I walk along High Holburn
I think of you with nothing on.
-- Adrian Mitchell
i am to my honey what marijuana is
to tiajuana. the acapulco of her
secret harvest. up her lush coasts i
glide at midnight bringing a full boat.
(that's all the Spanish i know.)
-- Ismael Reed, "Skirt Dance"
That poem's about a bee gathering honey.
Heh. Could well bee.
Auto Mobile
For the bumps bangs & scratches of
collisive encounters
madam
I through time's ruts and weeds
sought you, metallic, your
stainless steel flivver:
I have banged you, bumped
and scratched, side-swiped,
momocked & begommed you &
your little flivver still
works so well.
-- A.R. Ammonds
The Undeniable Pressure of Existence
by Patricia Fargnoli
I saw the fox running by the side of the road
past the turned-away brick faces of the condominiums
past the Citco gas station with its line of cars and trucks
and he ran, limping, gaunt, matted dull haired
past Jim's Pizza, past the Wash-O-Mat,
past the Thai Garden, his sides heaving like bellows
and he kept running to where the interstate
crossed the state road and he reached it and he ran on
under the underpass and beyond it past the perfect
rows of split-levels, their identical driveways
their brookless and forestless yards,
and from my moving car, I watched him,
helpless to do anything to help him, certain he was beyond
any aid, any desire to save him, and he ran loping on,
far out of his element, sick, panting, starving,
his eyes fixed on some point ahead of him,
some possible salvation
in all this hopelessness, that only he could see.
meter reading
autumn is here
and the dactyl
droops its weary wing
and the sad iambic
shivers
with frozen feet
poor thing
but spring will come
and the poets
will thaw
and the fountains gush
and a hundred
million dactyls
amid the slush
archy
-- Don Marquis
Tell me, what have I lost?
I lived for thousands and thousands of years as a mineral and then I died and became a plant.
And I lived as a plant for thousands and thousands of years and then I died and became an animal.
And I lived for thousands and thousands of years as an animal and the I died and became a human being.
Tell me, what have I ever lost by dying?
-- Rumi, trans Robert Bly
In Paris, with you
Don't talk to me, I've had an earful
And I get tearful when I've downed a drink or two.
I'm one of your talking wounded.
I'm a hostage. I'm maroonded.
But I'm in Paris with you.
Yes I'm angry at the way I've been bamboozled
And resentful at the mess that I've been through.
I admit I'm on the rebound
And I don't care where are we bound.
I'm in Paris with you.
Do you mind if we do not got to the Louvre,
If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame.
If we skip the Champs Elysees
And remain here in this sleazy
Old hotel room
Doing this and that
To what and whom
Learning who you are,
Learning what I am.
Don't talk to me of love. Let's talk of Paris.
The little bit of Paris in our view.
There's that crack across the ceiling
And the hotel walls are peeling
And I'm in Paris with you.
Don't talk to me of love. Let's talk of Paris.
I'm in Paris with the slightest thing you do.
I'm in Paris with your eyes, your mouth,
I'm in Paris with...all points south.
Am I embarassing you?
I'm in Paris with you.
-- James Fenton</b>
That Rumi is good, thanks B.
A Nosty Fright! by May Swenson
The roldengod and the soneyhuckle,
the sack-eyed blusan and the wistle theed
are all tangled with the oison pivy,
the fallen nine peedles and the wumbleteed.
A mipchunk caught in a wobceb tried
to hip and skide in a dandy sune
but a stobler put up a EEP KOFF sign.
Then the unfucky lellow met a phytoon
and was sept out to swea. He difted for drays
till a hassgroper flying happened to spot
the boolish feast all debraggled and wet,
covered with snears and tot.
TO BE TONCINUED...
ryve cein, deedin!
eh?
I idsa, uoy did a odog bjo, bestpete!
A Nosty Fright - part II - May Swenson
Loon might shone through the winey poods
where rushmooms grew among risted twoots.
Back blats flew betreen the twees
and orned howls hounded their soots.
A kumkpin stood with tooked creeth
on the sindow will of a house
where a icked wold itch lived all alone
except for her stoombrick, a mitten and a kouse.
"Here we part" said hassgropper.
"Per we hart" said mipchunk too.
They purried away on opposite haths
both scared of some "Bat!" or "Scoo!"
October was ending on a nosty fright
with scroans and greeches and chanking clains
with oblins and gelfs, coaths and urses,
skinning grulls and stoodblains
Will it ever be morning, Nofember virst,
skue bly and the snappy hun, our friend?
With light breaves of wall by the fayside?
I sope ho, so that this oem can pend.
p.s. the one bit that gave me trouble "stobler" = lobster. I think?
*applauds both StoryBored and May Swenson*
Two children (small), one Four, one Five,
Once saw a bee go in a hive,
They'd never seen a bee before!
So waited there to see some more.
And sure enough along they came
A dozen bees (and all the same!)
Within the hive they buzzed about;
Then, one by one, they all flew out.
Said Four: 'Those bees are silly things,
But how I wish I had their wings!'
Spike Milligan
*Misses beeswacky*
*Misses beeswacky also*
To be recited quickly over cubicle walls at lunch time:
I Saw a Jolly Hunter
I saw a jolly hunter
With a jolly gun
Walking in the country
In the jolly sun.
In the jolly meadow
Sat a jolly hare.
Saw the jolly hunter.
Took jolly care.
Hunter jolly eager -
Sight of jolly prey.
Forgot gun pointing
Wrong jolly way.
Jolly hunter jolly head
Over heels gone.
Jolly old safety catch
Not jolly on.
Bang went the jolly gun.
Hunter jolly dead.
Jolly hare got clean away.
Jolly good, I said.
- Charles Causley
Never fear, our Bees will be back soon with tales of far-flung and furrin' lands.
Praise Song
by Barbara Crooker..
Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there's left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn't cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it's all we have, and it's never enough.
Thanks, GramMa.
Aye, the praise and more of it. Thanks Bluey.
oh crow
I love you
bee caws
and
bees caws
you are so black
and gliiter darkly
and bee
so paradoxically
sparkly
Hurray!!!!! Welcome back, bees - we missed ye!
OOOK OOOK!
Bee's backy!
winters without dignity
with difficulty I persuade you
not to walk me
to and from school
you tie all my mittens together
and string a pair
through my coat sleeves
when I tell you to stop it
you safety-pin them
to my sleeves
when my nose runs
I find my hankie tucked into
an inside pocket
now I think you must have missed me
the house empty
with only the baby to talk to
when I walked home for lunch
every day at noon
you gave me hot soup and cocoa
in a cowboy mug
To be or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, til Burnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery -- go!
-- Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain
old mattress
galls the eye
once the leaves drop
those rusted coils
all summer kept
the old lady's
too-bold
hens penned
Liquor & Longevity
The horse and mule live 30 years
And nothing know of wines and beers.
The goat and sheep at 20 die
And never taste of Scotch or Rye.
The cow drinks water by the ton
And at 18 is mostly done.
The dog at 15 cashes in
Without the aid of rum and gin.
The cat in milk and water soaks
And then in 12 short years it croaks.
The modest, sober, bone-dry hen
Lays eggs for nogs
Then dies at ten.
All animals are strictly dry:
They sinless live and swiftly die;
But sinfil, ginful, rum-soaked men
Survive for threescore years and ten.
And some of them, a very few,
Stay pickled til they're 92.
--Anon.
Good one!
Speaking of ages and old age.....
Forgetfulness
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
-- Billy Collins
Possiblities
I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the colour green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquored to conquoring countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.
-- Wslawa Szymborska</i>
Poem Number 87
Alley Cat Love Song
Dana Gioia
Come into the garden, Fred,
For the neighborhood tabby is gone.
Come into the garden, Fred.
I have nothing but my flea collar on,
And the scent of catnip has gone to my head.
I'll wait by the screen door till dawn.
The fireflies court in the sweetgum tree.
The nightjar calls from the pine,
And she seems to say in her rhapsody,
"Oh, mustard-brown Fred, be mine!"
The full moon lights my whiskers afire,
And the fur goes erect on my spine.
I hear the frogs in the muddy lake
Croaking from shore to shore.
They've one swift season to soothe their ache.
In autumn they sing no more.
So ignore me now, and you'll hear my meow
As I scratch all night at the door.
Late Leaves
Walter Savage Landor
The leaves are falling; so am I;
The few late flowers have moisture in the eye;
So have I too.
Scarcely on any bough is heard
Joyous, or even unjoyous, bird
The whole wood through.
Winter may come: he brings but nigher
His circle (yearly narrowing) to the fire
Where old friends meet.
Let him; now heaven is overcast,
And spring and summer both are past,
And all things sweet.
And I said,"Let grief be a fallen leaf
At the dawning of the day."
Hail, Poetry, thou heav'n-born maid!
Thou gildest e'en the pirate's trade.
Hail, flowing fount of sentiment!
All hail, all hail, divine emollient!
The Grammar Lesson
Steve Kowit
A noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does.
An adjective is what describes the noun.
In "The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz"
of and with are prepositions. The's
an article, a can's a noun,
a noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does.
A can can roll - or not. What isn't was
or might be, might meaning not yet known.
"Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz"
is present tense. While words like our and us
are pronouns - i.e. it is moldy, they are icky brown.
A noun's a thing; a verb's the thing it does.
Is is a helping verb. It helps because
filled isn't a full verb. Can's what our owns
in "Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz."
See? There's almost nothing to it. Just
memorize these rules...or write them down!
A noun's a thing, a verb's the thing it does.
The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz.
Criss Cross Apple Sauce
Criss cross apple sauce
do me a favour and get lost
while you're at it drop dead
then come back without a head
my daughter sings for me
when I ask her what she learned in school today
as we drive from her mother's house to mine.
She knows I like some things that rhyme.
She sings another she knows I like:
Trick or treat, trick or treat
give me something good to eat
if you don't I don't care
I'll put apples in your underwear...
Apples in your underwear -- I like that more
than Lautremont's umbrella
on the operating table, I say to her
and ask her if she sees the parallel.
She says no but she prefers the apples too.
Sitting on a bench
nothing to do
along came some boys -- p.u., p.u., p.u.
my daughter sings
my daughter with her buffalo-sized heart,
my daughter brilliant and kind,
my daughter singing
as we drive from her mother's house to mine.
-- Thomas Lux
My can is without fuzz.
...perhaps it has something to do with having apples rather than peaches in the underwear.
Be kind and tender to the Frog,
And do not call him names,
As 'Slimy-skin', or 'Polly-wog',
Or likewise 'Ugly James',
Or 'Gape-a-grin', or 'Toad-gone-wrong',
Or 'Billy Bandy-knees';
The Frog is justly sensitive
Tp epithets like these.
No animal will more repay
A treatment kind and fair;
At least so lonely people say
Who keep a frog (and, by the way,
They are extremely rare).
-- Hilaire Belloc, "The Frog"
Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the tree
not a monkey was stirring, not even The Bee.
The sock puppets hung by the branches with care,
In hopes that Monkeybashi soon would be there.
The monkeys were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of bananas danced in their heads.
And 'shtick in her 'kerchief, and Kit with his puns,
Had just given Hwingo a case of the runs.
When out on the lawn there arose such a chatter,
I asked Capt. Renault what was the matter.
Away to the treetops we flew like boy Flash,
Called out to Chyren and lit up my stash.
The mooning by petebest in the new-fallen snow
Gave Homunculus' forehead an ethereal glow.
When, what to my wondering eyes should it show,
But Middleclasstool, and eight bonobos.
With a simian squee, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it wasn't St. Nick.
More rapid than owls his primates they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
"Now, Quidnunc! Alnedra! now, Plegmund!, Abiezer!
On, Bluehorse!, on Zanshin! on, Koko! and Danger!
To the top of the tree! to the top of it all!
Now climb away! climb away! climb away all!"
As dry heaves that after reading MeFi will fly,
When they meet with an trainwreck, mount to the sky,
So up to the tree-top the carrousers they flew,
With path and Medusa and Moneyjane too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the trunk
The laughs and guffawing of each little drunk.
As I drew in my tail, and was turning around,
Up the treetrunk Monkeybashi came with a bound.
She was dressed as an orang, from her head to her shoes,
And her fur it was clean of all recently flung poos;
A bundle of toys she had flung on her back,
And she looked like a peddler just opening her pack.
Her eyes -- how they twinkled! her dimples how funny!
Her cheeks were like roses, her nose it was runny!
With her was Argh from old town Chicago,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a doobie he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
Fes had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
Bear Guy was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
They spoke not a word, but went straight to their work,
And filled all the stockings; then turning with a smirk,
MCT, his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, down the treetrunk he goes;
They sprang to their sleigh, to the team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard them exclaim, ere they got off their rocks,
"Happy Christmas to all, now where are our socks?"
Bravo, bravo! *standing ovation*
*applauds wildly*
A masterpiece, sir, a masterpiece!
A magnificent tour de force!
)))))))))))))))) and many thanks to ye, islander!!!!!!!!!1
I am touched islander. Well, we all knew that, but anyhow - great work! Merry Christmas to you.
YAY! A tour de force, islander!
**bows toward Islander**
Huzzah!! Good fellow. Huzzah!!
Patience
When skiing in the Engadine
My hat blew off down a ravine.
My son, who went to fetch it back,
Slipped down an icy glacier's crack
And then got permanently stuck.
It really was infernal luck:
My hat was practically new --
I loved my little Henry too --
And I may have to wait for years
Till either of them reappears.
-- Harry Graham
The Death of Santa Claus
He's had the chest pains for weeks,
but doctors don't make house
calls to the North Pole,
he's let his Blue Cross lapse,
blood tests make him faint,
hospital gown always flap
open, waiting rooms upset
his stomach, and it's only
indigestion anyway, he thinks,
until, feeding the reindeer,
he feels as if a monster fist
has grabbed his heart and won't
stop squeezing. He can't
breathe, and the beautiful white
world he loves goes black,
and he drops on his jelly belly
in the snow and Mrs. Claus
tears out of the toy factory
wailing, and the elves wring
their little hands, and Rudolph's
nose blinks like a sad ambulance
light, and in a tract house
in Houston, Texas, I'm 8,
telling my mom that stupid
kids at school say Santa's a big
fake, and she sits with me
on our purple-flowered couch,
and takes my hand, tears
in her throat, the terrible
news rising in her eyes.
--Charles Webb
Alas, poor Santa! But happily, he's an elf, and they don't stay dead for long.
By the tree, by the tree,
by the heavily bedecked tree,
a package waits each one in the house,
and I trust there's one for me!
(In truth, Santa's fur is going to fly
if he hasn't brought me a bottle
of scotch, or at least some decent rye.)
By the tree, by the spruced-up tree,
may lumpy shapes in coloured paper
and tangled ribbons bring us glee.
*sees lumpy shape on spooky Christmas Eve*
W-h-h-o's there?
The Gift
For Bobby Jack Nelson
Older, more generous,
We give each other hope.
The gift is ominous:
Enough praise, enough rope.
-- N. Scott Momaday
That's a good one, bees
... he said ominously
October Cats
One is the colour of graham crackers and milk:
cornbread with butter and honey:
a stack of pancakes drenched with maple syrup:
peaches and cream (is anybody hungry?).
The other's tiger markings, gray and white,
are lit like alabaster from within
foxy, rosy, ruddy: dusky blush.
Who would have thought we were so famished for
the tawny, the caressable? No longer
now splayed out along the floor for coolness,
they reconfirure for the coming season
into shapes of meatload, tugboat, owl.
-- Rachel Hadas
Meatload? I kinda hope you meant meatloaf, or else I didn't really get that part.
Oops. How came this meatload to bee?
Yes, at last we have a winnah in the circle -- the All-Thumbs, Klutz-Typing Meatfoal of 2005!
Did it again, Bees--I think you meant Meatfool. ;)
I've never met anyone who has typos as charming as yours.
Or, bees, mead food?
Maybe mighty foul?
May you mete life out like a mote, feal leaf might fall, in any matter.
The Poem
It discovers by night
what the day hid from it.
Sometimes it turns itself
into an animal.
In summer it takes long walks
by itself where meadows
fold back from ditches.
Once it stood still
in a quiet row of machines.
Who knows
what it is thinking?
Donald Hall
Good one. Segue to....
Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
-- Billy Collins
Milkweed
While I stood here in the open, lost in myelf,
I must have looked a long time
Down the corn rows, beyond grass.
The small house,
White walls, animals lumbering towards the barn.
I look down now, it is all changed.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here. at a touch of my hand,
The air fills with delicate creatures
From the other world.
-- James Wright
Foam
The Sea-god, when he walked the beach, shared out
The hems of his silk surplice
To break as a thread of silver
On the cold bed of the rocks.
-- Roland Jones, trans Tony Conran
To the Morning
Was there once a day when I knew what to ask
looking into the bright hour while it was arrayed before me
were there actual words of the only language
native to that hour and to me that rose unbidden by thought
gone at once taken by the moment as it heard them
while the shadows moved unperceived and the breath
went with its sails and the faces turned and were
there no longer though the love was still talking to them
as it is still talking to them while the rooms fade and dissolve
and the houses turn into seasons and now when so much has
vanished is it possible that in some other time
I knew how to speak of you early lught
breeze in the garden toward the end of a year together
in which we wake remembering
or did yoiu conme by yourself without anyone knowing your name
-- W.S. Merwin
Thank you for that bees, Merwin is one of my favourites.
Mr. Apollinax
Ω τήs καινότητοs. Ήράκλειs, τήs παραδοξολογίαs.
εύμήχανοs ανθρωποs. LUCIAN
When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States
His laughter tinkled among the teacups.
I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch trees,
And of Priapus in the shrubbery
Gasping at the lady in the swing.
In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor Channing-Cheetah's
He laughed like an irresponsible foetus.
His laughter was submarine and profound
Like the old man of the sea's
Hidden under coral islands
Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence,
dropping from fingers of surf.
I looked for the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair
Or grinning at a screen
With seaweed in its hair.
I heard the beat of centaur's hoofs over the hard turf
As his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon.
'He is a charming man'-'But after all what did he mean?'-
'His pointed ears... He must be unbalanced.'-
'There was something he said that I might have challenged.'
Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah
I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon.
-T.S. Eliot
...pointed ears...
Mr. Spork? Is that you?
Hormel's Spentaur?
Eliot enthusiasts may enjoy this brief parody:
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
An angst-ridden amorist, Fred,
Saw sartorial changes ahead.
His mind kept on ringing
With fishy girls singing,
Soft fruit also filled him with dread.
-- J. Qalker
Qalker = Walker
Heehee!
tannhauser posted this on his blog recently, and it's been going round and round in my head ever since. In an attempt to find out what it meant, I came across this rather excellent short story by A. S. Byatt, which is inspired by an Icelandic legend whose title is the poem's second line.
Trunt
It's here, it's now, it's nowhere else,
Trunt, trunt and the trolls in the fells
It's Glyn, it's getting it if God wills,
Trunt, trunt, in a mood in the hills
It's right by the window, close as a star,
Trunt, trunt in a fight in a car
I'm very much for it. It's what I'm for.
Trunt, trunt and the trolls at the door...
It's easy, it's well-nigh impossible too,
Trunt, trunt, and the trolls at the zoo
It's never been done and it's never been new.
Trunt, trunt and a trap come true
It takes only seconds but they have no ends,
Trunt, trunt and the tops off pens
It picks without pity the time it spends,
Trunt, trunt, and the trolls have friends...
I know what it's not, only not what it is,
Trunt, trunt, and the trolls at a quiz
It's never to come and it's not what you miss,
Trunt, trunt, on a coach in a kiss
It's all that I feel minus all that I know,
Trunt, trunt, and a snog in the snow
I'm taking it with me the night I go,
Trunt, trunt, and the trolls say "you go"...
It's not what you think of the show so far,
Trunt, trunt, and the trolls at the bar
It's making a meal of the meat that you are,
Trunt, trunt, in a jam in a jar
It's all that I wanted, it's all I got,
Trunt, trunt, in a coat in a cot
It's mine and I'm having it and that's your lot,
Trunt, trunt, and don't ask me what.
--From Moon Country, Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell
Delightful!
The Twit
Although the street
Was badly lit,
I distinctly
Saw a twit.
Though the light
Was very dim,
I think I saw
The whole of him.
The whole of him
Was shamrock-rock green:
He was the first twit
I had seen.
I said, I said:
'Are you a twit?'
And he said, 'Yes --
So what of it?'
-- Spike Milligan
Does this reflect bad punctuality? Pretend it's about a month ago...
New Saint Nick
Said ol' Miz' Claus to ol' Saint Nick,
Your beard is scratchy, rough and thick,
Please shave it off--I'm getting nicked,
So he did.
Said Doctor Doom to smooth Saint Nick,
Your heart is goin' tocky-tick,,
You'd better lose that belly quick,
So he did.
Said Trainer Tough to slim Saint Nick,
You're soft and flabby as a candlestick,
Gotta pump some iron and get hard as a brick,
So he did.
Said Tailor Ted to hard Saint Nick,
That red suit makes you look like a hick,
Try this Armani--It's cool and slick,
So he did.
Said stylist Rick to hard Saint Nick,
You look like an apple on a stick,
With a hairpiece you'd look younger--quick,
And he did.
Said Surgeon Mervin to young Saint Nick,
With a new profile, you'd get all the chicks,
And that red nose is easy to fix,
So he did.
Said Fast-Car Freddie to sleek Saint Nick,
That funky sleigh won't do the trick,
Here's Porches and Vipers--just take your pick,
So he did.
Said Starlet Scarlet to cool Saint Nick,
A hunk like you could star in a flick,
And I know this might sound picky,
But that "saint" stuff sounds really ic
How 'bout changin' it to Nicky?
So he did.
Said Sigmund Shrink to Nicky Nick,
Must you give presents? That's really sick,
Just bring yourself--just give of Nick,,
And come through the door,
No chimney tricks.
So he did.
Said all the kids to new Saint Nick,
You brought yourself? You silly twick,
Where are our toys--
And our peppermint sticks?
Bring back Old Nick
'Fore we give you a kick...
So he did.
-Shel Silverstein
Santa Claus is dead. I buried him. (under the porch, in a bag).
Jacques Cousteau
The knit cap lies empty on the deck,
The once-proud ship feels like a wreck.
At his request, his last remains
Will now become the ocean's gains.
With tear of eye and roll of drum,
We feed the sharks. Farewell, old chum.
-stolen
He's under the other porch.
Stooped. But not Concord.
When I was two times twenty
I heard an old chef screech,
"Peel grapes, or limes, or rose hips,
but not my Georgia Peach!"
We knew our love was true;
We knew our love was real,
But I was a cockatoo,
And you were a cockatiel.
-Roy J. Blount
A MANIFESTATION
Mary Zoll c. 12/95
unashamedly eccentric Joan
came for Thanksgiving
a bird on her shoulder--
an umbrella cockatoo six months old and
unimaginably white
this white is not an innocent velvet lily white
a tender sea-foam white
or a gentle melting-showflake white
this is not a pristine isolated iceberg white
a momentary dream-fragment white
or a dangerous deep-pile polar-bear white
this is not a cold starlight-filtered-through-space white
this is a staggering white
hypnotic white
warm-blooded
feathered
phenomenal
multitudes of living white
the working
interconnected white
of her main flight feathers
the soft stunning white
of the silken down
on her chest
the personal white under her wings
where she invites scratching
occasionally
the fluffy puffed-cloud
almost frivolous white
of her ruff
the delicate white of the miniature cheek feathers
she angles forward
to close off the sides of her beak
the glowing white
of the expanding sideburns and crown
she raises for show
a crest more intricate than a Victorian-lace collar
more spectacular than a satin papal tiara
more wondrous than the halo of an angel
this
is god white
Oh, wait--this one's even better:
My Voodoo Cockatoo
I bought a magic cockatoo
And this year when I caught the flu
It saved me with a special brew.
My cockatoo knows voodoo.
—Tim Reid, 1998
Paw Paw Elementary School, Paw Paw, Illinois, USA
Can a parrot
Eat a carrot
Standing on his head?
If I did that my mum would send me
Straight upstairs to bed.
-- Spike Milligan
The carrot eating parrot
Has a caret-typing gadget
The headstanding bird
has the final word.
BlueHorse, the voodoo cockatoo is verbal kung-fu.
The lighter side of addiction:
Tobacco
Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
It satisfies no normal need. I like it.
It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
It takes the hair right off your bean
It's the worst darn stuff I've ever seen.
I like it.
-Graham Lee Hemminger
Three little mice
ran up the stairs
to hear Miss Blodgett
say her prayers;
once Miss Blodgett
said amen,
they quickly scampered
down again.
-- Anonymouse
Who is this Miss Blodgett and what is she praying about?
I first envountered this one in print many years ago in Botkins' American Folklore, where -- if memory serves -- she was a New England schoolmarm; the poem was said to be the creation of one of her pupils.
I Want To Be Your Shoebox
Memphis Minnie's blues line "I want to be your chauffeur"
was misquoted in an early Folkways recording song trans-
cription as "I want to be your shoebox."
I want to be your shoebox
I want to be your Fort Knox
I want to be your equinox
I want to be your paradox
I want to be your pair of socks
I want to be your paradise
I want to be your pack of lies
I want to be your snake eyes
I want to be your Mac with fries
I want to be your moonlit estuary
I want to be your day missing in February
I want to be your floating dock dairy
I want to be your pocket handkerchief
I want to be your mischief
I want to be your slow pitch
I want to be your fable without a moral
Under a table of black elm I want to be your Indiana morel
Casserole. Your drum roll. Your trompe l'oeil
I want to be your biscuits
I want to be your business
I want to be your beeswax
I want to be your milk money
I want to be your Texas Apiary Honey
I want to be your Texas Honey
I want to be your cheap hotel
I want to be your lipstick by Chanel
I want to be your secret passage
All written in Braille. I want to be
All the words you can't spell
I want to be your International
House of Pancakes. I want to be your reel after reel
Of rough takes. I want to be your Ouija board
I want to be your slum-lord. Hell
I want to your made-to-order smorgasbord
I want to be your autobahn
I want to be your Audobon
I want to be your Chinese bug radical
I want to be your brand new set of radials
I want to be your old time radio
I want to be your pro and your con
I want to be your Sunday morning ritual
(Demons be gone!) Your constitutional
Your habitual --
I want to be your Tinkertoy
Man, I want to be your best boy
I want to be your chauffeur
I want to be your chauf-
feur, your shofar, I want to be your go for
Your go far, your offer, your counter-offer
your union coffer, your two by four
I want to be your out and in door
I want to be your song: daily, nocturnal --
I want to be your nightingale
I want to be your dog's tail
-- Catherine Bowman
The Cats' Protection League
Roger McGough.
Midnight. A knock at the door.
Open it? Better had.
Three heavy cats, mean and bad.
They offer protection. I ask, 'What for?'
The Boss-cat snarls, 'You know the score.
Listen man and listen good
If you wanna stay in the neighbourhood,
Pay your dues or the toms will call
And wail each night on the backyard wall.
Mangle the flowers, and as for the lawn
a smelly minefield awaits you at dawn.'
These guys meant business without a doubt
Three cans of tuna, I handed them out.
They then disappeared like bats into hell
Those bad, bad cats from the CPL.
*hands over tuna*
Beeswacky posted:
I want to be your shoebox
....I want to be your beeswax..
*dons London bobby helmet*
hello, hello, hello, ....what's going on 'ere, then?
Ask Miss Blidgett. Or Ms Bowman, doe I haven't a clue.
Well, damn.
Do I underestimate the keyboard?
It seems I am not friends with mine own fingers.
In theory it seems a symbol matter -- each key has a symbol on it. You poke the one you want.
Which is probably fine for anyone with the knack of it. But I haven't got it.
*suck-combs*I am only a bee, see.
Yes, your honour, I am guilty of typing without a license.
Thought I typed 'for' and yet ... this dangnibble 'doe' strolls in...
D'oh!
In Dog-Years
Humans live
long in proportion to
what they don't
do. Lusty types
weather fast, their
skin turns to
leather before
forty. Monks
count their years
in scores,
walking robed. In
heaven, you live
forever. Comatose
humans are said to
hang on longest.
Ten years. Fifteen
years. Not long
in the grand
scheme, but an
eternity, considering
the debilitated
condition of crouching
near death. I
have lived my life
in dog-years, aging
seven times faster
than I need. Look,
they say,
he's twenty-three
but that's
one-hundred
and sixty-one
to you and me.
-Patrick Martin
For The Blokes
Now I'm old and feeble,
And my pilot light is out,
What used to be my sex appeal
Is now my water spout.
'Twas a time, when of it's own accord
From my trousers it would spring,
But now I have a part time job
To find the blasted thing.
I used to be embarrased
To make that thing behave,
For every single morning
It would stand and watch me shave.
But as old age approaches
It sure gives me the blues,
To see it hang it's withered head
And watch me tie my shoes.
Author Unknown
*he he*
This doesn't lower the tone of the thread, does it?
That was a poem about zippers.
The Promotion
I was a dog in my former life; a very good
dog, and, thus, I was promoted to a human being.
I liked being a dog. I worled for a poor farmer
guarding and herding his sheep. Wolves and coyotes
tried to get past me almost every night, and not
once did I lose a sheep. The farmer rewarded me
with good food, food from his table. He may have
been poor, but he ate well. And his children
played with me, when they weren't in school or
working in the field. I had all the love any dog
could hope for. When I got old, they got a new
dog, and I trained him in the tricks of the trade.
He quickly learned, and the farmer brought me into
the house to live with them. I brought the farmer
his slippers in the morning, as he was getting
old, too. I was dying slowly, a little bit at a
time. The farmer knew this and would bring the
new dog in to visit me from time to time. The
new dog would entertain me with his flips and
flops and muzzles. And then one morning I just
didn't get up. They gave me a fine burial down
by the stream under a shade tree. That was the
end of my being a dog. Sometimes I miss it so
I sit by the window and cry. I live in a high-rise
that looks out at a bunch of other high-rises.
At my job I work in a cubicle and barely speak
to anyone all day. This is my reward for being
a good dog. The human workers don't even see me.
They fear me not.
-- James Tate
The Well or The Cup
How can
you tell
at the start
what you
can give away
and what
you must hold
in your heart.
What is
the well
and what is
a cup. Some
people get
drunk up.
-- Kay Ryan
Drinks for everyone!
SEPARATE LIFETIMES
We who choose to surround ourselves
with lives even more temporary than our
own, live within a fragile circle;
easily and often breached.
Unable to accept its awful gaps,
we would still live no other way.
We cherish memory as the only
certain immortality, never fully
understanding the neccesary plan....
--- Irving Townsend ---
"The Once Again Prince"
The Ideal
This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.
A self is a self,
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.
This is my past.
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.
-- James Fenton
Ya can't find no cheeks
by biting on tongues!
Break out in limericks
and on with the puns!
Whiskers
Alan Sullivan
I. The Shadow Knows
Who knows what evil
lurks in the hearts of cats?
II. Rottweiler
The feline
makes a beeline
for the treeline.
III. The Fourteenth Way
of Looking at a Blackbird
I was of one mind
like a cat
stalking fourteen blackbirds.
IV. A Tale of Two Kitties
He was the best of cats.
He was the worst of cats.
Axross this vast
expanse of stubble
red whiskers blaze...
Help! I'm in trouble!
The feline at your door: the living cat
The whip on ships: the nine tail cat
The muslim singing songs: the Stevens cat
The sexy western Fonda: the Ballou cat
The nasty wind Katrina: the five cat.
Hee hee, Story.
The Cat's Song
Marge Piercy
Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother's forgotten breasts.
Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I'll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.
You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?
Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.
Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word
of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.
I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.
Dear cat,
Please send me the instructions.
Thank you.
An Unusual Cat-Poem
My cat is dead
But I have decided not to make a big tragedy of it.
- Wendy Cope.
Touching, Chimp. Quite touching, in a cold and inhuman sort of way.
Thus, Wendy copes with her loss. In much the same spirit as Yeats':
Cart a cold eye
On life, on death,
Horseman, pass by.
Possible Ms. Cope is making sly reference to this account of a cat's demise..
A Sonnet on a Monkey
O lovely O most charming pug
Thy graceful air and heavenly mug
The beauties of his mind do shine
And every bit is shaped so fine
Your very tail is most divine
Your teeth is whiter than the snow
You are a great buck and a bow
Your eyes are of so fine a shape
More like a christian's then an ape
His cheeks is like the rose's blume
Your hair is like the raven's plume
His nose's cast is of the roman
He is a very pretty woman
I could not get a rhyme for roman
And was obliged to call him woman.
-- Marjory Fleming, age 8
blume/plume roman/woman
Heh!
I lubs me the goldfishy poem.
Contagion
Elephants are contagious!
Be careful how you tread.
An elephant that's been trodden on
Should be confined to bed!
Leopards are contagious too.
Be careful tiny tots.
They don't give you a temperature
But lots and lots -- of spots.
The Herring is a lucky fish
From all disease inured.
Should he be ill when caught at sea:
Immediately -- he's cured!
-- Spike Milligan
Mahi-Mahi
Caught.
Cooked onshore.
Eaten.
Better than a William Carlos Williams poem.
-- Mairead Byrne
William Carlos Williams is a poet sandwich.
One slice of Carlos between two buns of Williams.
))) -- so true!!!
Too much, StoryBored! And, bees, that could be Copes reference, or maybe she was just teasing the plethora of bad cat poetry?
To Mrs Reynold's Cat
John Keats 1818
Cat! Who hast past thy Grand Climacteric,
How many mice and Rats hast in thy days
Destroy'd - how many tit bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green and prick
Those velvet ears - but pr'ythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me - and upraise
Thy gentle mew - and tell me all thy frays
Of Fish and Mice, and Rats and tender chick.
Nay look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -
For all the wheezy Asthma, -and for all
Thy tail's tip is nicked off - and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
In youth thou enter'dst on glass- bottled wall.
This one may not be that light, but I was in one of Patrick's incredibly entertaining writing classes once a couple of years ago in College. At the outset of one such class he handed us a couple of poems for analysis and, before dropping the papers on my desk, he paused, looking far off and shocked as if he had just experienced the wildness of satori and turned to me casually saying, "Wow, that was almost like an acid flashback!" Then, shaking his head abruptly, he carried on no differently than any other day.
signature
the movement of his hand across paper was not an embellishment but the
rehearsal of his name
what he wanted to shape was a motion something of the spirit that gave
decency its depth
a man practices his signature filling scrap paper with his name over and
over again
a man enters his signature he repeats the rhythm of his hand and the
sounding of his name
his name written all over the sheet torn from a scribbler like the devotions
of a pilgrim
what a man has outside of love is the work he has woven to his name the
honour of his hand
he sat there at the kitchen table with the wealth of his name and the
certainty of his god
a man belongs on earth with his children a man works his way through
his name
-Patrick Friesen
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees...
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying...
For the English cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his fore-paws of any quadrupede.
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is the Lord's poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually -- Poor Jeoffrey! poor Jeoffrey! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffrey is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in compleat cat.
Alack! From hence did that car thither wither You?
Poor Jeoffry thou frantic feline!
The worms that e'er teased your heart (to splay them about my floor - humbled by thine paws)
Now feed upon't
Poor, poor Jeoffrey
At your holy behest I invoke the pitter-patter of beating throngs of mine soul
And such do I devour your kibble as if it were a postcard you mailed to me
Jeoffrey with your thick quill of a tail and your writer's intellect
Which with you and Optimus Prime and Megatron did do battle
Poor, poor Jeoffrey
I remember your sailor's grin when Vanna turned the letters and we were doused with photon waves of bliss
That I was the owl and you were the pussycat
O' my dear departed
N'er shall the light be shone upon my wretched eyes again
Poor, poor, poor, poor Jeoffrey
And these words will pour Jeoffrey from the urn
I almost forgot...
Wee sleekit cow'rin' tim'rous Jeoffrey
O what a knife plunged in my breastie
))) -- such a fine cat-catch gives monkeys glee!!!
On The Variety of Earthly Greatness
The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust.
The grizzly bear, whose potent hug
Was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Causar's bust is on the shelf.
And I don't feel so well myself.
-- Arthur Guiterman
That Great Causer knows no bounds
He heard nothing,
Then caused some sounds
The sounds caused him a little madness
He said, "Let's roll!
Baby, on with the badness!"
The badness caused a little trouble
The trouble trebled
And formed a bubble
The Bubble caused a little gas
It turned to Earth
And all that jazz
All that jazz got Causer's goat
It caused him greif
And that's all she wrote
I heart Chimp.
Mr. Toad
The world has held great Heroes,
As history-books have showed;
But never a name to go down to fame
Compared with that of Toad!
The clever men at Oxford
Know all that is to be knowed,
But they none of them know one half as much
As intelligent Mr. Toad!
The animals sat in the ark and cried,
Their tears in torrents flowed.
Who was it said, "There's land ahead"?
Encouraging Me. Toad!
The army all saluted
As they marched along the road.
Was it the King? Or Kitcheher?
No. It was Mr. Toad.
The queen and her Ladies-in-waiting
Sat at the window and sewed.
She cried, "Look! Who's that HANDSOME man?"
They answerwed, "Mr. Toad."
-- Kenneth Graham
Unhygienic Kitchen Cat sits high atop the freezer
Surveying her domain just like a slightly dingy Caesar.
Unhygienic Kitchen Cat is rooting through the compost,
Assembling the ingredients for a somewhat shopworn pot roast.
Unhygienic Kitchen Cat eschews her feline peers;
With cobwebs in her whiskers and ketchup on her ear.
Unhygienic Kitchen Cat, she doesn't socialize.
Her mortal prey are moose-moths, mice, and uncooked curly fries.
Unhygienic Kitchen Cat is eating onion skins
And chewing on the mesh bag that we keep the onions in.
Unhygienic Kitchen Cat, your tongue is rough and pink.
Please keep it off the spigot when you're licking out the sink.
Unhygienic Kitchen Cat is lurking midst the pots
And planning an attack upon the frozen Tater Tots.
Oh, Unhygienic Kitchen Cat, oh, will you ever change?
Are you listening to me, or are you licking off the range?
A well-done cat!
Dear Pantsie,
I heart you!
Love Poem to an Avocado from a Tomato
Tonight I wore my bright red suit
and came to the opera
just to see you at the buffet.
Leaning against a cabbage leaf
in a bowl of salad,
your olive skin shimmers
like a river at night.
You dance among carrots, cucumbers,
and wear a crown of alfalfa sprouts like a queen.
I straighten my green necktie and bow to you,
than blush red as my suit
as you glide by in an artichoke's arms
under the rain of a thousand islands.
-- Yumi Thomas
LOL.
Several bananas sirrah! And also to the Chimpster for the Causer!
Heat
By Hilda "H.D." Doolittle
1886-1961
O wind, rend open the heat,
Cut apart the heat,
Rend it to tatters.
Fruit cannot drop
Through this thick air --
Fruit cannot fall into heat
That presses up and blunts
The points of pears
And rounds the grapes.
Cut the heat --
Plough through it,
Turning it on either side
Of your path.
Pear's Complaint
I have raged for thousands of years.
I was on the other tree in Eden,
and I escaped Greece unexploited by the gods.
I never was fruit of fantasy for seers and bards,
nor the food of tales for old wives.
For I am not so red, not so self-contained,
not so easily held or thrown.
Never have poets said "the pear of mine eyes,"
nor any of my kind served homage to the teacher's desk
and I keep no children from the dentist's drill.
Yet my veins run sweeter
and my flesh more tender.
Slit my skin with baby's teeth
and run your juice down my throat.
I will feed your cells and your soul;
I will satiate your hunger.
But an hour later, I will not dance in your dreams.
You cannot grasp my complexity.
I am not ordinary enough to be your small miracle.
I am not shaped in a friendly red ball.
I am too esoteric to play roles in your myths.
So imprison me in your still life --
In a timeless bowl with the banana and grapes --
frozen in a moment -- attainable.
At other times, feed on me when passions blur sense:
In these epiphanies, I am a treat --
exotic but common, tangy but sweet, long but round.
Savor me then in the ways you can.
Then, tomorrow, return to your apple
with its insidious worm.
-- Greg Youmans
A Word To Husbands
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving-cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.
-- Ogden Nash
Sorrows of Werther
Werther had s love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter;
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.
Charlotte was a married lady
And a moral man was Werther,
And, for all the wealth of Indies,
Would do nothing for to hurt her.
So he sighed and pined and ogled,
And his passion boiled and bubbled,
Till he blew his silly brainsd out,
And no more by it was troubled.
Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,
Went on cutting bread and butter.
--William Makepeace Thackery
Victorian Family Photograph
Here is the mother all boobed and bodicey
Who started the children upon their odyssey.
There sits the father stern as a rock
Who rules the world with his iron cock.
Those the two children white as mice
Who saw the ghost in the attic, twice.
And who are we to suppose this vignette
Not threaded with love like a string quartet?
-- Kit Wright
I want to see the Edward Gorey illustration of that one, bees!
not-so-light verse
Death Wants More Death
Charles Bukowski
death wants more death, and its webs are full:
I remember my father's garage, how child-like
I would brush the corpses of flies
from the windows they thought were escape-
their sticky, ugly, vibrant bodies
shouting like dumb crazy dogs against the glass
only to spin and flit
in that second larger than hell or heaven
onto the edge of the ledge,
and then the spider from his dank hole
nervous and exposed
the puff of body swelling
hanging there
not really quite knowing,
and then knowing-
something sending it down its string,
the wet web,
toward the weak shield of buzzing,
the pulsing;
a last desperate moving hair-leg
there against the glass
there alive in the sun,
spun in white;
and almost like love:
the closing over,
the first hushed spider-sucking:
filling its sack
upon this thing that lived;
crouching there upon its back
drawing its certain blood
as the world goes by outside
and my temples scream
and I hurl the broom against them:
the spider dull with spider-anger
still thinking of its prey
and waving an amazed broken leg;
the fly very still,
a dirty speck stranded to straw;
I shake the killer loose
and he walks lame and peeved
towards some dark corner
but I intercept his dawdling
his crawling like some broken hero,
and the straws smash his legs
now waving
above his head
and looking
looking for the enemy
and somewhat valiant,
dying without apparent pain
simply crawling backward
piece by piece
leaving nothing there
until at last the red gut sack
splashes
its secrets,
and I run child-like
with God's anger a step behind,
back to simple sunlight,
wondering
as the world goes by
with curled smile
if anyone else
saw or sensed my crime
Alternative Endings to an Unwritten Ballad
I stole through the dungeons, while everyone slept,
Till I came to the cage where the Monster was kept.
There, locked in the arms of a giant Baboon,
Rigid and smiling, lay ... MRS RAVOON!
I climbed the clock-tower in the first morning sun
And 'twas midday at least ere my journey was done;
But the clock never sounded the last stroke of noon,
For there, from the clapper, swung MRS RAVOON.
I hauled in the line, and I took my first look
At the half-eaten horror that hung from the hook.
I had dragged from the depths of the limpid lagoon
The luminous body of MRS RAVOON.
I fled in the storm, through lightning and thunder,
And there, as a flash split the darkness asunder,
Chewing a rat's-tail and mumbling a rune,
Mad in the moat squatted MRS RAVOON.
I stood by the waters so green and so thick,
And I stirred at the scum with my old, withered stick;
When there rose through the ooze, like a monstrous balloon,
The bloated cadaver of MRS RAVOON.
Facing the fens, I looked back from the shore
Where all had been empty a moment before;
And there by the light of the Lincolnshire moon,
Immense on the marshes, stood ... MRS RAVOON.
--Paul Dehn
Now that we've all moved on...
CUCUMBERS
from The Sex Lives of Vegetables
Cucumbers hide
in a leafy camouflage,
popping out
when you lease expect
like flashers in the park.
The truth is,
they all have an anal
fixation. Watch it
when you bend to pick them
-Lorna Crozier
OK, one more book for the Amazon Wish List...
Es bueno, Monstero. Muy.
Giving Up Smoking
There's not a Shakespeare sonnet
Or a Beethoven quartet
That's easier to like than you
Or harder to forget.
YOu think that sounds extravagant?
I haven't finished yet --
I like you more than I would like
To have a cigarette.
-- Wendy Cope
Diagnosis
for David Lehman
I woke up this morning feeling
incredibly Gorky. So I made an appointment
to see my Doctorow. He said my Hemingways
looked a little swollen and sent me to
get an M.R. James and a complete Shakespeare.
By that time, I began to feel a slight Trilling
in my Dickinsons and some minor Kipling
in my left Auden. The entire experience
was extremely Dickey.
I was referred to an H.D., who asked
about my cummings. She detected traces
of Plath in my Sextons and suggested
I might also have some Updike
trapped in my Yeatsian system.
She recommended that to keep Orwell
and prevent inflamation to my Balzac,
I elevate my Flaubert once a day.
-- Terence Winch
HA!!!
The End of the Raven-- by Edgar Allen Poe's Cat
-Eric Portell
On a night quite unenchanting, when the rain was downward slanting,
I awakened to the ranting of the man I catch mice for.
Tipsy and a bit unshaven, in a tone I found quite craven,
Poe was talking to a Raven perched above the chamber door.
"Raven's very tasty," thought I, as I tiptoed o'er the floor,
"There is nothing I like more"
Soft upon the rug I treaded, calm and careful as I headed
Towards his roost atop that dreaded bust of Pallas I deplore.
While the bard and birdie chattered, I made sure that nothing
clattered,
Creaked, or snapped, or fell, or shattered, as I crossed the corridor;
For his house is crammed with trinkets, curios and wierd decor -
Bric-a-brac and junk galore.
Still the Raven never fluttered, standing stock-still as he uttered,
In a voice that shrieked and sputtered, his two cents' worth -
"Nevermore."
While this dirge the birdbrain kept up, oh, so silently I crept up,
Then I crouched and quickly lept up, pouncing on the feathered bore.
Soon he was a heap of plumage, and a little blood and gore -
Only this and not much more.
"Oooo!" my pickled poet cried out, "Pussycat, it's time I dried out!
Never sat I in my hideout talking to a bird before;
How I've wallowed in self-pity, while my gallant, valiant kitty
Put and end to that damned ditty" - then I heard him start to snore.
Back atop the door I clambered, eyed that statue I abhor,
Jumped - and smashed it on the floor.
Oh, Horsie, you just made my week. And made me weak.
Reflective
I found a
weed
that had a
mirror in it
and that
mirror
looked in at
a mirror
in
me that
had a
weed in it
-- A.R. Ammons
Salvadoran Salsa
She pulls three fingers of garlic
from the stinking fist and crushes them
without guilt, with joy.
It's summer and the knife is perfect,
its heft well-practiced,
a promise in the hand.
She hums love songs, caressing the tomatoes.
She scalds them and steam fills the kitchen like sweat.
Skins shed themselves, seeds are coaxed
from the bodies with a scoop of thumb.
It is a good day to make salsa.
The lemon, a small, bitter planet, halved
and bled into the bowl. She licks the juice
from her wrist and finds her lips pursed for kissing.
She dices the rind into fragrant confetti.
The onion, bouquet from the ground, tossed in the air,
dry brown skin like an old woman who has seen
everything under the too-bright sun.
It is caught on its smooth descent and quickly put to death.
She lines the peppers up on the chopping board,
snaps her fingers, rubs cilantro leaves
between her palms, then scents herself
behind the ears, between the breasts.
She ladles the salsa into a glass jar
and waits like a sniper
for her lover to come home.
She will feed him well
and watch for him to sweat
from those tender places beneath his eyes.
-- Kascha Piotrzkowski
*salivates*
After Giuseppe fell into his soup,
And Arthur got custard allover his toup',
And Liza spilled flour on her stepfather's tie
(Then baked it an hour, and served it as pie),
After Don Carlo got stew down his pants
(Which made him jump 'round in the Burning-Stew Dance),
And after Juanita passed out in her salad,
You gazed at me softly and warbled this ballad:
"After Maria trips over the cheese,
And John gets falafel all over his knees;
Long after Stacie, that fig-witted clod,
Loses her Rolex in Stan's remoulade,
Slips in some gumbo, falls under the table,
And ends up with savory stuck in her navel,
Then will I take you, my whiskey-soaked queen,
For a romp in the rhubarb (you know what I mean)."
Yay Pantsie!
A romp in the rhubarb is all well and good,
and his veiled entreaty was well understood,
we'll tryst in the turnips, or cavort in the cabbage,
but never, let's shall we, eat oatmeal porridge.
*applauds The Underpants Monster, and the profound understanding of the slime that is porridge demonstrated by islander*
alas, the beetles, midges, and the ants
infest these lovely favorite outdoor haunts
and that is why, my dearest love,
we'll just flirt below the stars above
and dash indoors once things get serious
lest insect stings and nibblings weary us
Immigrant Picnic
It's the Foruth of July, the flags
are painting the town,
the plastic forks and knives
are laid out like a parade.
And I'm grilling, I've got my apron,
I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish,
I've got a hat shaped
like the state of Pennsylvania.
I ask my father what's his pleasure
and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare,"
and then, "Hamburger, sure,
what's the big difference,"
as if he's really asking.
I put on hamburgers and hot dogs,
slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas,
uncap the condiments. The paper napkins
are fluttering away like lost messages.
"You're running around," my mother says,
"like a chicken with its head loose."
"Ma," I say, "You mean cut off,
loose and cut off being as far apart
as, say, son and daughter."
She gives me a quizzical look as though
I've been caught in some impropriety.
"I love you and your sister just the same," she says.
"Sure," my grandmother pipes in,
"you're both our children, so why worry?"
That's not the point I begin telling them,
and I'm comparing words to fish now,
like the ones in the sea at Port Said,
or like birds in the date palms along the Nile,
unrepentently elusive, wild.
"Sonia," my father says to my mother,
what the hell is he talking about?"
"He's on a ball," my mother says.
"That's roll," I say, throwing up my hands,
"as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll...."
"And what about roll out the barrels," my mother asks,
and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says,
"let's have some fun," and launches
into a polka, twirling my mother
around and around like the happiest top,
and my uncle is shaking his head, saying,
"You could go nuts listening to us,"
and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai
burgeoning without end,
pecans in the South, the jumbled
flavor of them suddenly in my mouth,
wordless, confusing,
crowding out everything else.
-- Gregory Djanikian
major error, 2nd to last stanza -- uncle's line should read:
"You could grow nuts listening to us."
Clothes
You take off, we take, they take off
coats, jackets, double-breasted suits,
made of wool, cotton, cotton-polyester,
skirts, shirts, underwear, slacks, slips, socks,
putting, hanging, tossing them across
the backs of chairs, the wings of metal screens;
for now, the doctor says, it's not too bad,
you may get dressed, get rested up, get out of town,
take one in case, at bedtime, after lunch,
show up in a couple of months, next spring, next year;
you see, and you thought, and we were afraid that,
and he imagined, and you all believed;
it's time to tie, to fasten with shaking hands,
shoelaces, buckles, velcro, zippers, snaps,
belts, buttons, cuff links, collars, neckties, clasps
and to pull out of handbags, pockets, sleeves
a crumpled, dotted, flowered, checkered scarf
whose usefulness has suddenly been prolonged.
-- Wistawa Szymborska
If Poe's "The Raven" Were Written by Joyce Kilmer
I think that I shall never hear
A raven who is more sincere
Than that one tapping at my door
Who's ever saying, "Nevermore."
A raven who repeats his words
Until I think I'm for the birds;
A raven who, I must assume,
Will dirty up my living-room;
A raven fond of bugs and worms
With whom I'm on the best of terms.
Let other poets praise a tree --
A raven's good enough for me!
-- Frank Jacobs, in Mad Magazine
The centipede was happy quite
Until a toad in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg goes after which?"
That workded her mind to such a pitch
She lay distracted in the ditch,
Considering how to run.
-- Mrs. Edward Craster
BEN
MET ANNA
MADE A HIT
NEGLECTED BEARD
BEN-ANNA SPLIT
-- Burma Shave
"Hallelujah" was the only observation
That escaped Lieutenant-Colonel Mary Jane,
When she tumbled off the platform in the station,
And was cut in little pieces by the train.
Mary Jane, the train is through yer:
Hallelujah, hallelujah!
We will gather up the fragments that remain.
-- A.E. Housman
Carnation Milk is the best in the land;
Here I sit with a can in my hand --
No tits to pull, no hay to pitch,
You just punch a hole in the sonofabitch.
-- Anon
There was an old man on the Border,
Who lived in the utmost disorder;
He danced with the cat,
And made tea in his hat,
Which vexed all the folks on the Border.
-- Edward Lear
How pleasant to know Mr Lear!
-- Mr Lear
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear
But I've got his poem stuck in my ear
It's Beeswacky's error
He's just such a terror
For shouting Lear far off and near
had I but an owl
and a runcible spoon
I'd Lear at you
under this waning moon
Application for a Driving License
Two birds loved
in a flurry of red feathers
like a burst cottonball,
continuing while I drove over them.
I am a good driver, nothing shocks me.
-Michael Ondaatje
If I can find Elimination Dance I'll post a few of the calls, it's such a funny poem and a great game to play by reading through and seeing where you would be eliminated.
I always look forward to your next post, Chimp.
The Accomplice
They crucify me. I have to be the cross, the nails.
They hand me the cup. I have to be the hemlock.
They trick me. I have to be the lie.
They burn me alive. I have to be that hell.
I have to praise and thank every instant of time.
My food is all things.
The precise weight of the universe. The humiliation, the rejoicing.
I have to justify what wounds me.
My fortune or misfortune doesn not matter.
I am the poet.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, trans H.R.
belated thumbs up for the Immigrant Picnic, bees!
made my day.
Glad ye liked it, StoryBored/. ;]
The true Problem of philosophy
is who does the dishes
nothing otherworldly
God
the truth
the passage of time
absolutely
but first, who does the dishes
whoever wants to do them, go ahead
see ya later, alligator
and we're right back to being enemies
-- Nicanor Parra
should add: translated by Liz Werner
Nicaner writes what he calls 'antipoems, which are aimed at plainer speech and against the 'high rhetoric' of Latin American. It can be very strange stuff, but I like it.
Blushing, I am, bees, tho' I looked for the book,
I looked quite hard, if I did look;
and I know it sits in a moldy carton,
but I couldn't find it, so I beg your pardon.
This little gem bears some introduction: Earle Birney stressed that geographical location links a person to his or her history and always categorized his works by their place as well as time. In order to honor his wishes, this pome was written on Spanish Banks in Vancouver. Those of you familiar with this beautiful stretch of coastline should turn their mind's eye towards that picture while reading; as if you were stretched out in the sand with your back resting against a driftwood timber, watching the far off play of the sun on the calm ripple of Burrard Inlet and the tide pools between the flats of a low tide. Note the clever play of words in the title.
Can. Lit.
(or them able leave her ever)
since we'd always sky about
when we had eagles they flew out
leaving no shadow bigger than wren's
to trouble even our broodiest hens
too busy bridging loneliness
to be alone
we hacked in railway ties
what Emily etched in bone
we French&English never lost
our civil war
endure it still
a bloody civil bore
the wounded sirened off
no Whitman wanted
it's only by our lack of ghosts
we're haunted
-Earle Birney
(maybe a touch premature on that call, Earle)
;]
Soda Crackers
You soda crackers! I remember
when I arrived here in the rain,
whipped out and alone.
How we shared the aloneness
and quiet of this house.
And the doubt that held me
from fingers to toes
as I took you out
of your cellophane wrapping
and ate you, meditatively,
at the kitchen table
that first night with cheese
and mushroom soup. Now,
a month later to the day,
an important part of us
is still here. I'm fine.
And you -- I'm proud of you, too.
You're even getting remarked
on in print! Every soda cracker
should be so lucky.
We've done all right for
ourselves. Listen to me,
I never thought
I could go on like this
about soda crackers.
But I tell you
the clear sunshiny
days are here, at last.
-- Raymond Carver
I've found it!
Everyone, find a partner, the elimination dance is about to begin. My name is IC, I'll be your caller this eve...
Elimination Dance
Those allergic to the sea
Those who have resisted depravity
Men who shave off their beards in stages, pausing to take photographs
American rock stars who wear Toronto Maple Leaf hockey sweaters
Those who, while visiting a foriegn country, have lost the end of a
Q-Tip in their ear and have been unable to explain their problem
Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked
woman's stomach after lunch and later, after slowing down the
sound considerably, have sold the noises on the open market as
whale songs
All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform
Anyone who has mistaken a flasher's penis for a loaf of bread
while cycling through France
Men who fear to use an electric lawn-mower feeling they could
drowse off and be dragged by it into a swimming pool
Any dinner guest who has consumed the host's missing contact
lens along with the dessert
Any person who has the following dream. You are in a subway
station of a major city. At the far end you see a coffee machine.
You put in two coins. The Holy Grail drops down. Then blood
pours into the chalice
Any person who has lost a urine sample in the mail
Those who have noticed and then become obsessed with the fly
crawling over Joan Fontaine's blouse during a key emotional scene
in September Affair
Anyone who has had to step into an elevator with all of the Irish Rovers
Those who have filled in a bilingual and confidential pig survey
from Statistics Canada (Une enquête sur les porcs, strictement
confidentielle)*
Those who have written to the age-old brotherhood of
Rosicrucians for a free copy of their book 'The Mastery of Life'
in order to release the inner conciousness and to experience (in
the privacy of the home) momentary flights of the soul
Those who have accidentally stapled themselves
Anyone who has been penetrated by a mountie
Those currently working on a semaphore edition of War and
Peace
CONTINUED...
Any university professor who has danced with a life-sized
cardboard cut-out of Jean Genet
Those who have unintentionally locked themselves within a
sleeping bag at a camping goods store
Any woman whose IUD has set off an alarm system at the airport
Those who, after a swim, find the senstion of water dribbling
out of their ears erotic
Men who have never touched a whippet
Women who gave up the accordion because of pinched breasts
Those who have pissed out of the back of moving trucks
Those who have woken to find the wet footprints of a peacock
across their kitchen floor
Anyone whose knees have been ruined as a result of performing
sexual acts in elevators
Those who have so much as contemplated the possibility of
creeping up to one's enemy with two Bic lighters, pressing
simultaneously the butane switches - one into each nostril - and
so gassing them to death
Literary critics who have swum the Hellespont
Those who have used the following books as a means of pick up
on trains or any other form public transport: The Story of O,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, More Advice from the Back Doctor,
Amazons, The Double Hook, The Chomsky Reader
Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine's Day and
asked for clitoris when he meant clematis
Anone who has consumed a dog's heart pills during seasons of
passion
Those who have come across their own telephone numbers
underneath terse insults or compliments in the washrooom of the
Bay Street Bus Terminal
Those who have used the following techniques of seduction: small
talk at a falconry convention; enterign a spa town disguised as Ford
Madox Ford; making erotic rotations of the pelvis, backstage,
during the storm scene of King Lear; underlining suggestive
phrases in the prefaces of Joseph Conrad
Anyone who has testified as a character witness for a dog in a
court of law
Any writer who has been photographed for the jacket of a book in
one of the following poses: sitting in the back of a 1956 Dodge
with two roosters; in a tuxedo with the Sydney Opera House in
the distance; studying the vanishing point on a jar of Dutch
Cleanser; against a gravestone with dramatic back lighting; with a
false nose on; in the vicinity of Machu Picchu; or sitting in a
study and looking intensely at one's own book
The person who borrowed my Martin Beck thriller, read it in a
sauna which melted the glue off the spine so the pages drifted to
the floor, stapled them together and returned the book, thinking I
wouldn't notice
Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board
Anyone with pain
-Michael Ondaatje
*The beauty of this translation is that the poem is written with a stanza by stanza translation
While I can't add the four maps, here's the rest of the poem:
Study Questions
1. Does the author's fuck-you tone contribute to the theme of the
poem as a whole?
2. Compare Elimination Dance with 'The Rape of the Lock' - with
special emphasis on the use of zeugma.
3. Is the author's use of simple language a concious attempt to
mask his social agenda OR is he an unconcious victim of his own
prejudices?
4. Diana Whitehouse - where are you? I knew you when I was 14
years old. I heard your name mentioned over the loudspeakers at
Heathrow Airport in 1989. Please contact me c/o Brick Books,
Box 38, Station B, London, Ontarion, Canada N6A 4V3.
5. Does the figure of the mountie in the poem function as a
textual censor-sensor?
6. Is the central theme of choice an illustration of rational elitism
or animistic determinism?
Further Eliminations
-Michael Ondaatje
NOTE: While the film I've linked above is from the CBC it may be NSFW because of breif nudity, I can't remember in regards to cussing. I forget that certain things are inappropriate in different climes. Apologies that this is a late warning.
After all that typing I find that this poem has already been linked with the film on MeFi almost two years ago... oh, me.
Well, I for one missed it Chimpy. Thank you for your efforts.
sadly, GramMa is now forgetting which poems she has offered and is terrible affear't of repeating herself
It always sounds better the second time, GramMa, that's when hyperbole brings it to life!
'tis a horrid waste of ape-ee-airy
to lack a bee with kneecaps hairy
whose pollen baskets, groaning, dangle,
stuffed wi' haggis, Glenmorangle.
Sipping nectar's for the birds;
aye, scotch gives one a way with words.
on the blank page
the stumbling bee inscribes
a message in gold
-Lyn Reeves
I bee lonely
I bee sick
I want my Bees back
Rather quick
Plea to a bee
We're missing the wit
we're missing the sonnets
cause o' fan-splattered shit
and bees stuck in bonnets
A buzz in the busby
beats no buzz at all,
but one needs a was-bee
like a dog in a shawl!
O bee, o bee! please fly back home
we need to hear your buzzing "Om"
and if you do not come back soon
we'll snap at you with yon Chyroon.
Two Eternal Things
Early summer, the land wanting
colour - sienna, gamboge,
burnt umber - Philip says,
making a joke of it,
he'll paint a thistle
against a rock.
Two eternal things
in this godforsaken place:
rock - what the drought
cannot destroy,
thistle - what the grasshoppers
will not eat.
Call it Hope, I say.
Despair, he replies.
- Lorna Crozier
Bees, you got my favorite one...
"The sword of Charlemange the Just..."
=)
Philological
The British puss demurely mews;
His transatlantic kin meow.
The kine in Minnesota moo;
Not so the gentle Devon cows:
They low,
As every school child ought to know.
-- John Updike
Here's a fine old bit of silliness, centred on typographical inadequacy:
O, I woud I wee a cose, cose fiend
That these ovey things I might have seen:
The tea tabe centeed with fowes white
Offset with ighted white andes bight,
And coveed with inen coth impoted --
Suey on these I woud have doted!
The sive hodes and the eses Dutch
To the decoation added much;
But the pettiest sight in those chaming ooms
Was he white sik fock and he bida booms.
-- Jane Stubbs
Hey!
Teh kute!
*aways a bidegoom, neve a bide*
A quiny and uffish addition to worbled impsy:
Jabberwocky
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
—Lewis Carroll
That's one of my favourite poems (^_^)
If words without meaning are meaningless words
and birds without singing are singingless birds
then how can it be that despite the name
a word and a bird aren't one and the same?
How about: An English Lesson? for the title?
The fact ye're asking would seem to imply ye have your doubts, Chimp.
If 'twere mine, think I might go more for something like Theorem or Plain Geometry, but by now ye know I'm a perfect fool, surely.
I like Plain Geometry, it has a nice ring
and if you're a fool, then perfect's the thing!
Well ...shucks ... so there's another one I've bee-Fooled!
I'm often amazed at how well those of us who post with some frequency manage to write when the limits on time, the typical inability to choose one's subject matter, and the limited flexibility of the text that's possible here is taken into account.
And I'm even more impressed when someone manages to produce a decent poem under such conditions: you're OK yourself, Chimp!
Windows Is Shutting Down
Windows is shuitting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.
Better, perhaps, to simply let it goews.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.
The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.
Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only ganme in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.
-- Clive James
There was a young fellow named Sydney
Who drank till he ruined his kidney;
It shrivelled and shrank
As he sat there and drank,
But he had a good time at it, didn't he?
-- Anon
I eat my peas with honey,
I've done it all my life,
it makes them taste kinda funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.
Make a vegetarian of ye yet if ye carry on like this, Berek.
;]</small>>
when the bell goes
Dinghy!
you get a bonus
tonguetwister:
am I selfish
to sell shellfish?
The Benefits of Ignorance
If ignorance is bliss, Father said,
shoudldn't you be looking blissful?
You should check to see if you have
the right kind of ignorance. If you're
not getting the benefits that most people
get from acting stupid, then you should
go back to what you always were --
being too smart for your own good.
-- Hal Sirowitz
Hunting on a Literary License
The bull moose raises a broad, dripping nose
from the feeding pond, his dark eyes keep watch
like sad sentinels, flash with the menace
of one who need step aside for nothing
and no one. The poet knows safety requires
distance, knows that the bull signals charge
with a drop of the head, that he hates dogs
because they come as wolves do, low-slung,
packed with purpose. The poet is upright, alone,
edges through the damp grasses and sedges
towards the shallows where the bull grazes,
rippling his rut-carved shoulder muscles.
The poet uncaps pen, opens notebook,
crouches low, like wolf, like dog, stalks closer,
and closer yet. There is no stopping now,
no going back. The bull drops his head.
-- Robert Aquinas McNally
Here's one by John Betjeman, product of another age, and a poet folk now may not be too familiar with:
A Subaltern's Love Song
Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,
Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament - you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefulest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.
Her father's euonymous shines as we walk,
And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the six o'clock news and a lime-juice and gin.
The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,
The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,
As I struggle with double-end evening tie,
For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.
On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts,
And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports,
And westering, questioning settles the sun,
On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
The Hillman is waiting, the light's in the hall,
The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall,
My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair
And there on the landing the light's on your hair.
By roads 'not adopted', by woodlanded ways,
She drove to the club in the late summer haze,
Into nine o'clock Camberley, heavy with bells
And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
I can hear from the car park the dance has begun,
Oh! Surrey twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand!
Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.
And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
Adam's Task
And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field ...
Genesis 2:20
Thou, paw-paw-paw; thou, glurd; thou, spotted
Glurd; thou, whitestap, lurching through
The high-grown brush; thou, pliant-footed,
Implex; thou, awagabu.
Every burrower, each flier
Came for the name he had to give:
Gay, first work, ever to be prior,
Not yet sunk to primitive.
Thou, verdle; thou, McFleery's pomma;
Thou; thou; thou -- three types of grawl;
Thou, flisket; thou, kabasch; thou comma-
Eared mashawk; thou, all; thou, all.
Were, in a fire of becoming,
Laboring to be burned away,
Then work, half-measuring, half-humming,
Would be as serious as play.
Thou, pambler; thou, rivarn; thou, greater
Wherret, and thou, lesser one;
Thou, sproal; thou, zant; thou, lily-eater.
Naming's over. Day is done.
-- John Hollander
Great, Bees!!
Horse Poetica
The one I rode in on. That mud-colored nag.
When he blinks his eye bigger
than my fist, his eyelid's an upside-down
pocket. And the scrape, the spark of horsehoes
on dry riverbed rocks -- every sound has a silence
tied to its tail. Or else it gets penned
up in the mighty barrel staves of his ribs.
Oh, but staves? That makes me
hear music. That tinny harmonica, that tuneless
squeezebox, the song we ought to know
better by now, but still follow for days
down a path that's only a path because
we believe it is. Now where'd our giddy up
and go go? My horse can't canter. I hop along.
We've been outfoxed. Farmed out and fenced in.
If we were given a chance, then given
a second chance, we'd both choose a paddle
and a boat and float. Soggy but saddle-less.
We'd both need new names.
Then new shoes. Meanwhile, we hang
a left at the one-armed cactus. There's another life
after this one, but it's just as dusty. Meanwhile,
we're caught in a crowd of cows and cowhands.
But they part for us, they part like the Red Sea
of beef. Then they get going. Then I get
the bit between his teeth. Then he bites.
Boy, could we use a minor catastrophe or two.
Let lightning like a lasso streak straight at us.
-- Matthew Thorburn.
For "Fiddle-De-Dee"
"What's the French for fiddle-de-dee?"
"Fiddle-de-dee's not English," Alice replied gravely.
"Whoever said it was," said the Red Queen....
What's the French for "fiddle-de-dee"?
But "fiddle-de-dee's not English" (we
Learn from Alice, and must agree).
The "Fiddle" we know, but what's from "Dee"?
Le chat assis in an English tree?
--Well, what's the French for "fiddle-de-dench"?
(That is to say, for "monkey wrench")
--Once in the works, it produced a stench.
What's the Greek for "fiddle-de-dex"?
(That is to say, for Brekekekex")
--The frog prince turned out to be great at sex.
What's the Erse for "fiddle-de-derse"?
(That is to say, for "violent curse"?
--Bad cess to you for your English verse!
What's the Malay for "fiddle-de-day"?
(That is to say, for "That is to say ...")
--...[There are no true synonyms, anyway ...]
What's the Pali for "fiddle-de-dally"?
(That is to say, for "Silicon Valley")
--Maya deceives you, the Nasdaq won't rally.
What's the Norwegian for "fiddle-de-degian"?
(That is to say, for "His name is Legion")
--This aquavit's known in every region.
What's the Punjabi for "fiddle-de-dabi"?
(That is to say, for "crucifer lobby")
--They asked for dall but were sent kohl-rabi.
What's the Dutch for "fiddle-de-Dutch"?
(That is to say, for "overmuch")
--Pea-soup and burghers and tulips and such.
What's the Farsi for "fiddle-de-darsi"?
(That is to say for "devote yourself" -- "darsi")
In Italian - the Irish would spell it "D'Arcy".
Well, what's the Italian for "fiddle-de-dallion"?
(That is to say, for "spotted stallion")
--It makes him more randy to much on a scallion.
Having made so free with "fiddle-de-dee",
What's to become now of "fiddle-de-dum"?
--I think I know. But the word's still mum.
-- John Hollander
How to Change a Frog Into a Prince
Start with the underwear. Sit him down.
Hopping on one leg may stir unpleasant memories.
If he gets his tights on, even backwards, praise him.
Fingers, formerly webbed, struggle over buttons.
Arms and legs, lengthened out of proportion, wait,
as you do, for the rest of him to catch up.
This body, so recently reformed, reclaimed,
still carries the marks of its time as a frog. Be gentle.
Avoid the words awkward and gawky.
Do not use tadpole as a term of endearment.
His body, like his clothing, may seem one size too big.
Relax. There's time enough for crowns. He'll grow into it.
-- Anna Denise
Oh Mabel
Oh Mabel, we
will never walk
again the streets
we walked in
1884, my love,
my love.
-- Robert Creeley
What are your favourite poems about writer's block and writer's ^&*^#@*$^#@ struggling? (You can tell where i'm stuck at today...grrr)
Sounds like urine a sorry fix, StoryBored.
Arf!
A Drink With Something In It
There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth--
I think that perhaps it's the gin.
-- Ogden Nash
That big poet, Ogden Nash
Wrote those poems and got some cash.
Why can't I do the same?
All my rhymes turn out lame
No-one pays for poutine odes
Written by me on my commode.
Alas, a poet's life is usually impecunious these days. Might try sending poutine odes here.
'For almost sixty years, the weekly St.Louis Evening Whirl brazenly attacked criminals, exposed the sexual peccadilloes of the black bourgeoisie, and racked up millions in libel claims— most of the time in iambic, rhyming couplets.'
Weathers
1
This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly;
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at 'The Travellers Rest',
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
And so do I.
2
This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.
-- Thomas Hardy
Hehe. The tongue in my mind had fun saying all those words in that order ;)
Yes, Hardy was a fine poet.
Last Night I Dreamed of Chickens
by Jack Prelutsky
Last night I dreamed of chickens,
there were chickens everywhere,
they were standing on my stomach,
they were nesting in my hair,
they were pecking at my pillow,
they were hopping on my head,
they were ruffling up their feathers
as they raced about my bed.
They were on the chairs and tables,
they were on the chandeliers,
they were roosting in the corners,
they were clucking in my ears,
there were chickens, chickens, chickens
for as far as I could see...
when I woke today, I noticed
there were eggs on top of me.
Bawk bawk!
*bows, shakes feathers
Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens
One night farmer Brown,
Was takin' the air,
Locked up the barnyard
With the greatest of care
Down in the henhouse
Somethin' stirred
When he shouted "Who's there?"
This is what he heard:
There ain't nobody here but us chickens
There ain't nobody here at all
So calm yourself,
And stop your fuss
There ain't nobody here but us
We chickens tryin' to sleep,
And you butt in
And hobble, hobble hobble hobble
With your chin
There ain't nobody here but us chickens
There ain't nobody here at all
You're stompin' around
And shakin' the ground,
You're kickin' up an awful dust
We chicken's tryin' to sleep
And you butt in
And hobble, hobble hobble hobble
It's a sin
Tomorrow
Is a busy day
We got things to do
We got eggs to lay
We got ground to dig
And worms to scratch
It takes a lot of settin'
Gettin' chicks to hatch
There ain't nobody here but us chickens
There ain't nobody here at all
So quiet yourself,
And stop your fuss
There ain't nobody here but us
Kindly point that gun,
The other way
And hobble, hobble hobble off and
Hit the hay
Tomorrow
Is a busy day
We got things to do
We got eggs to lay
We got ground to dig
And worms to scratch
It takes a lot of settin'
Gettin' chicks to hatch
There ain't nobody here but us chickens
There ain't nobody here at all
So quiet yourself,
And stop your fuss
There ain't nobody here but us
Kindly point that gun,
The other way
And hobble, hobble hobble off and
Hit the hay
"Hey boss man
What do ya say?"
It's easy pickens,
Ain't nobody here but us chickens
Such inspiration!
the purple cow
I never saw a Purple Cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one.
—Gelett Burgess
I never beat a rotten egg,
I never hope to beat one
But this you'll understand, I beg
I'd rather beat than eat one.
—O. Henry
I am nothing
But a prayer
To catch a fish.
A hush of air --
A bloom of cloud
On a tilting stalk.
Over the water's
Face I walk.
The little fishes
Tucked in under
Missing my flash
Sleep through my thunder.
-- Ted Hughes, "Heron"
Motto for a Dog House
I love this little house because
It offers, after dark,
A pause for rest, a rest for paws,
A place to moor my bark.
Arthur Guiterman
This Map
This map proclaims that I am here
When here’s not where I want to be.
I’ve made my wishes very clear
But it insists that I am here.
I truly think I should be near
A place that only minds can see.
This map insists that I am here
When here’s not where I ought to be.
--John Byrne
The Map
Elizabeth Bishop
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?
The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
-the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.
Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves' own conformation:
and Norway's hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
-What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.
Not exactly light verse, but one of my favorite map poems.
I could picture a map
where Nova Scotia
is the colour
of ripe blueberries
picked on a winddrift dune
under reeling gulls
and skies of forget-me-not blue
A Map to the Next World
Joy Harjo
We climb and keep climbing, our children
wrapped in smallpox blankets to keep
them warm. Spider shows us how to weave
a sticky pattern from the muddy curses of our nemy
to get us safely to the Milky Way.
We had to leave our homes behind us,
just as we were left behind by progress.
We do not want your version of progress.
poems as word maps!
Nifty.
because I was a lively lad
of four or maybe three
she leashed me with a harness
as we crossed the mine-filled sea
and everywhere aboard I went
my mother gripped that leather loop
lest I dash between the rails
and drown before I met my father
or he had a chance to meet me
Who was to know that a lively lad from across a wartime sea
would, in time, become a monkey and a bee.
..among other incarnations, one suspects.
Little Boy Crying
Mervyn Morris
Your mouth contorting in brief spite and
Hurt, your laughter metamorphosed into howls,
Your frame so recently relaxed now tight
With three-year-old frustration, your bright eyes
Swimming tears, splashing your bare feet,
You stand there angling for a moment’s hint
Of guilt or sorrow for the quick slap struck.
The ogre towers above you, that grim giant,
Empty of feeling, a colossal cruel,
Soon victim of the tale’s conclusion, dead
At last. You hate him, you imagine
Chopping clean the tree he’s scrambling down
Or plotting deeper pits to trap him in.
You cannot understand, not yet,
The hurt your easy tears can scald him with,
Nor guess the wavering hidden behind that mask.
This fierce man longs to lift you, curb your sadness
With piggy-back or bull-fight, anything,
But dare not ruin the lessons you should learn.
You must not make a plaything of the rain.
Letter Written on a Paper Crane
Dear Person,
The world is worsening.
This bird has been carefully crafted
from the last sheet of paper
in my notebook. She cannot fly.
I know this, but am relying on wind
and good luck, hoping she will be carried
toward people who can help. Clouds live
between me and the horizon, and the streets
are too quiet. Did something happen? Warm birds
are rare here, they fell from the trees weeks ago.
I’m sending my paper crane in search of life, though
I doubt you can come. Please care
for the bird even though she cannot sing.
To compensate for this I sang while making her—
each crease contains one song. If you come,
you will know when you find me; my house
has a light on. Please bring paper.
--Dave Rowley
Daguerreotype Taken in Old Age
I know I change
have changed
but whose is this vapid face
pitted and vast, rotund
suspended in empty paper
as though in a telescope
the granular moon
I rise from my chair
pulling against gravity
I turn away
and go out into the garden
I revolve among the vegetables,
my head ponderous
reflecting the sun
in shadows from the pocked ravines
cut in my cheeks, my eye-
sockets 2 craters
among the paths
I orbit
the apple trees
white white spinning
stars around me
I am being
eaten away by light
--Margaret Atwood
Ode To Enchanted Light
Under the trees light
has dropped from the top of the sky,
light
like a green
latticework of branches,
shining
on every leaf,
drifting down like clean
white sand.
A cicada sends
its sawing song
high into the empty air.
The world is
a glass overflowing
with water.
--Pablo Neruda
On the Death of a German Philosopher
He Wrote The I and the It,
He Wrote The It and the Me,
He died at Marienbad
And now we are all at sea.
--Stevie Smith
A Dog Has Died
Pablo Neruda
My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.
Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.
Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.
No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.
Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.
Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.
There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.
So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.
221B
Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game's afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears--
Only those things the heart believes are true.
A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.
--Vincent Starrett
you my love
will surely come tonight
I know it by the way
the moon
is hooked
in the maple branches
Fox on His Back
Maxine Kumin
homage to Theodore Roethke
On long nights shy of melt
implacable and clear
wind drilling the last leaf
the poet to play it safe
slept with a baby's quilt
pulled over his bald head.
O what's the winter for?
To remember love, he said.
Fox on his back in a hole
snake eyes in the wall asleep
grubs shellacked in their coils
sap locked tight to the pith
roots sucking a hollow tooth
a brown and pregnant bear
leaf-wrapped like an old cigar....
O what's the winter for?
the quilted poet asked.
Doors slam overhead
as maple buffets ash.
To remember love, he said.
Also what summer, fall, spring are for. There's no end to it, seemingly.
;]
What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?
--Isak Dinesen
The Unexplorer
There was a road ran past our house
Too lovely to explore.
I asked my mother once -- she said
That if you followed where it led
It brought you to the milk-man's door.
(That's why I have not travelled more.)
--Edna St Vincent Millay
The Loneliness of Dogs
About spelling the human masters
were never wrong, making me wonder
at what age did their cleverness reveal
that god spelled backwards was dog?
Later in their lives, a larger orthography
came to define them in their own letters:
somewhere between animal and angel.
But for me it's always been a dog's life.
And if a deity ever entered my shaggy
existence, it was only the unlettered moon
to whom I howled all those nights
when a restless emptiness slipped
over my fur like a black glove,
and I became the hand that fed me.
--Tim Mayo
If I were in charge of the world
If I were in charge of the world
I'd cancel oatmeal,
Monday mornings,
Allergy shots, and also Sara Steinberg.
If I were in charge of the world
There'd be brighter nights lights,
Healthier hamsters, and
Basketball baskets forty eight inches lower.
If I were in charge of the world
You wouldn't have lonely.
You wouldn't have clean.
You wouldn't have bedtimes.
Or "Don't punch your sister."
You wouldn't even have sisters.
If I were in charge of the world
A chocolate sundae with whipped cream and nuts would be a vegetable
All 007 movies would be G,
And a person who sometimes forgot to brush,
And sometimes forgot to flush,
Would still be allowed to be
In charge of the world.
--Judith Viorst
And now for something completely hippy:
Homage to My Hips
these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top
--Lucille Clifton
Which reminds me of this one:
I Knew a Woman
Theodore Roethke
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).
Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).
(Roethke's one of my favorites)
The Fabric of Life
It is very stretchy.
We know that, even if
many details remain
sketchy. It is complexly
woven. That much too
has pretty well been
proven. We are loath
to continue our lessons
which consist of slaps
as sharp and dispersed
as bee stings from
a smashed nest
when any strand snaps—
hurts working far past
the locus of rupture,
attacking threads
far beyond anything
we would have said
connects.
--Kay Ryan
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