767 Humor poems

Yes, I live inside the piano, but there is no need for you to come and visit me.

I’ve trod the links with many a man, And played him club for club; ’Tis scarce a year since I began And I am still a dub. But this I’ve noticed as we strayed Along the bunkered way, No one with me has ever played As he did yesterday. It makes no difference what the drive, Together as we walk, Till we up to the ball arrive, I get the same old talk: “To-day there’s something wrong with me, Just what I cannot say. Would you believe I got a three For this hole—yesterday?” I see them top and slice a shot, And fail to follow through, And with their brassies plough the lot, The very way I do. To six and seven their figures run, And then they sadly say: “I neither dubbed nor foozled one When I played—yesterday!” I have no yesterdays to count, No good work to recall; Each morning sees hope proudly mount, Each evening sees it fall. And in the locker room at night, When men discuss their play, I hear them and I wish I might Have seen them—yesterday. Oh, dear old yesterday! What store Of joys for men you hold! I’m sure there is no day that’s more Remembered or extolled. I’m off my task myself a bit, My mind has run astray; I think, perhaps, I should have writ These verses—yesterday.

I Put a sun in Sunday, Sunday. Eleven please ten hoop. Hoop. Cousin coarse in coarse in soap. Cousin coarse in soap sew up. soap. Cousin coarse in sew up soap. II A lea ender stow sole lightly. Not a bet beggar. Nearer a true set jump hum, A lamp lander so seen poor lip. III Never so round. A is a guess and a piece. A is a sweet cent sender. A is a kiss slow cheese. A is for age jet. IV New deck stairs. Little in den little in dear den. V Polar pole. Dust winder. Core see. A bale a bale o a bale. VI Extravagant new or noise peal extravagant. VII S a glass. Roll ups. VIII Powder in wails, powder in sails, powder is all next to it is does wait sack rate all goals like chain in clear. IX Negligible old star. Pour even. It was a sad per cent. Does on sun day. Watch or water. So soon a moon or a old heavy press. X Pearl cat or cat or pill or pour check. New sit or little. New sat or little not a wad yet. Heavy toe heavy sit on head. XI Ex, ex, ex. Bull it bull it bull it bull it. Ex Ex Ex. XII Cousin plates pour a y shawl hood hair. No see eat. XIII They are getting, bad left log lope, should a court say stream, not a dare long beat a soon port. XIV Colored will he. Calamity. Colored will he Is it a soon. Is it a soon. Is it a soon. soon. Is it a soon. soon. XV Nobody’s ice. Nobody’s ice to be knuckles. Nobody’s nut soon. Nobody’s seven picks. Picks soap stacks. Six in set on seven in seven told, to top. XVI A spread chin shone. A set spread chin shone. XVII No people so sat. Not an eider. Not either. Not either either. XVIII Neglect, neglect use such. Use such a man. Neglect use such a man. Such some here. XIX Note tie a stem bone single pair so itching. XX Little lane in lay in a circular crest. XXI Peace while peace while toast. Paper eight paper eight or, paper eight ore white. XXII Coop pour. Never a single ham. Charlie. Charlie. XXIII Neglect or. A be wade. Earnest care lease. Least ball sup. XXIV Meal dread. Meal dread so or. Meal dread so or bounce. Meal dread so or bounce two sales. Meal dread so or bounce two sails. Not a rice. No nor a pray seat, not a little muscle, not a nor noble, not a cool right more than a song in every period of nails and pieces pieces places of places. XXV Neat know. Play in horizontal pet soap. XXVI Nice pose. Supper bell. Pull a rope pressed. Color glass. XXVII Nice oil pail. No gold go at. Nice oil pail. Near a paper lag sought. What is an astonishing won door. A please spoon. XXVIII Nice knee nick ear. Not a well pair in day. Nice knee neck core. What is a skin pour in day. XXIX Climb climb max. Hundred in wait. Paper cat or deliver XXX Little drawers of center. Neighbor of dot light. Shorter place to make a boom set. Marches to be bright. XXXI Suppose a do sat. Suppose a negligence. Suppose a cold character. XXXII Suppose a negligence. Suppose a sell. Suppose a neck tie. XXXIII Suppose a cloth cape. Suppose letter suppose let a paper. Suppose soon. XXXIV A prim a prim prize. A sea pin. A prim a prim prize A sea pin. XXXV Witness a way go. Witness a way go. Witness a way go. Wetness. Wetness. XXXVI Lessons lettuce. Let us peer let us polite let us pour, let us polite. Let us polite. XXXVII Neither is blessings bean. XXXVIII Dew Dew Drops. Leaves kindly Lasts. Dew Dew Drops. XXXIX A R. nuisance. Not a regular plate. Are, not a regular plate. XL Lock out sandy. Lock out sandy boot trees. Lock out sandy boot trees knit glass. Lock out sandy boot trees knit glass. XLI A R not new since. New since. Are new since bows less. XLII A jell cake. A jelly cake. A jelly cake. XLIII Peace say ray comb pomp Peace say ray comb pump Peace say ray comb pomp Peace say ray comb pomp. XLIV Lean over not a coat low. Lean over not a coat low by stand. Lean over net. Lean over net a coat low hour stemmed Lean over a coat low a great send. Lean over coat low extra extend. XLV Copying Copying it in. XLVI Never second scent never second scent in stand. Never second scent in stand box or show. Or show me sales. Or show me sales oak. Oak pet. Oak pet stall. XLVII Not a mixed stick or not a mixed stick or glass. Not a mend stone bender, not a mend stone bender or stain. XLVIII Polish polish is it a hand, polish is it a hand or all, or all poles sick, or all poles sick. XLIX Rush in rush in slice. L Little gem in little gem in an. Extra. LI In the between egg in, in the between egg or on. LII Leaves of gas, leaves of get a towel louder. LIII Not stretch. LIV Tea Fulls. Pit it pit it little saddle pear say. LV Let me see wheat air blossom. Let me see tea. LVI Nestle in glass, nestle in walk, nestle in fur a lining. LVII Pale eaten best seek. Pale eaten best seek, neither has met is a glance. LVIII Suppose it is a s. Suppose it is a seal. Suppose it is a recognised opera LIX Not a sell inch, not a boil not a never seeking cellar. LX Little gem in in little gem in an. Extra. LXI Catch as catch as coal up. LXII Necklaces, neck laces, necklaces, neck laces. LXIII Little in in in in. LXIV Next or Sunday, next or sunday check. LXV Wide in swim, wide in swim pansy. LXVI Next to hear next to hear old boat seak, old boat seak next to hear LXVII Ape pail ape pail to glow. LXVIII It was in on an each tuck. It was in on an each tuck. LXIX Wire lean string, wire lean string excellent miss on one pepper cute. Open so mister soil in to close not a see wind not seat glass.

the bare-backed barback in the bear bar’s back bar barebacked with a bare bear who was also a barback back there

There was a young lady of Lynn, Who was so uncommonly thin That when she essayed To drink lemonade She slipped through the straw and fell in.

No day is right for the apocalypse, if you ask a housewife in Talking Rock, Georgia, or maybe Hop River, Connecticut. She is opening a plastic bag. A grotesque parody of the primeval muck starts oozing out. And behold, the plastic bag is magic; there is no closing it. Soap in unsoftened water, sewage, asbestos coiled like vermicelli, Masonite shavings, a liquefied lifetime subscription to The New York Times delivered all at once. Empty body stockings, limp, forlorn, like collapsed lungs. A blithering slur of face creams, an army of photocopies travelling on its stomach of acronyms, tooth paste tubes wrung rigid and dry. Also, two hundred and one tons of crumpled bumpers wrapped in insurance claims, slag, coal dust, plastic trimmings, industrial excrementa. Lake Erie is returning our gifts. At first she thought she had won something. Now it slithers through the house, out windows, down the street, spreading everywhere but heading, mostly, west. Maybe heading is the wrong word, implying shape and choice. It took the shape of the landscape it rippled across like the last blanket. And it went west because the way lay open once again: not the same fecund rug the earth grew when white people scraped their first paths to the Pacific across the waves of the inland grasses. Outside Ravenswood, West Virginia, abandoned cars shine in the sun like beetlebacks. The ore it took to make the iron it took to make the steel it took to make the cars, that ore would remember the glaciers if it could. Now comes another grinding, but not— thanks to our new techniques—so slow. The amiable cars wait stilly in their pasture. Three Edsels forage in the southeast corner like bishops of a ruined church. There are Fords and Dodges, a Mercury on blocks, four Darts and a Pierce Arrow, a choir of silenced Chevrolets. And, showing their lapsed trademarks and proud grilles to a new westward expansion, two Hudsons, a LaSalle and a DeSoto. I was hoping to describe the colors of this industrial autumn— rust, a faded purple like the dusty skin of a Concord grape, flaking moss- green paint with primer peeking blandly through, the garish macho reds insurance companies punish, the greys (opaque) and silvers (bright), the snob colors (e.g. British Racing Green), the two-tone combinations time will spurn like roadkill (1957: pink and grey), cornflower blue, naval blue, royal blue, stark blue, true blue, the blacker blue the diver sees beneath him when he plumbs thirty feet— but now they are all covered, rolling and churning in the last accident, like bubbles in lava. And now my Cincinnati—the hills above the river, the lawn that drained toward Ricwood Ave. like a small valley of uncles, the sultry river musk that slid like a compromising note through my bedroom window— and indeed all Cincinnati seethes. The vats at Proctor & Gamble cease their slick congealing, and my beloved birthplace is but another whorl of dirt. Up north near Lebanon and Troy and Rosewood, the corn I skulked in as a boy lays back its ears like a shamed dog. Hair along the sow’s spine rises. The Holstein pivots his massive head toward where the barn stood; the spreading stain he sees is his new owner. What we imagined was the fire-storm, or, failing that, the glacier. Or we hoped we’d get off easy, losing only California. With the seismologists and mystics we say the last California ridge crumble into the ocean. And we were read with elegies: O California, sportswear and defense contracts, gasses that induce deference, high school girls with their own cars, we wanted to love you without pain. O California, when you were moored to us like a vast splinter of melon, like a huge and garish gondola, then we were happier, although we showed it by easy contempt. But now you are lost at sea, your cargo of mudslides and Chardonnays lost, the prints of the old movies lost, the thick unlighted candles of the redwoods snuffed in advance. On the ocean floor they lie like hands of a broken clock. O California, here we come, quoting Ecclesiastes, ruinous with self-knowledge. Meanwhile, because the muck won’t stop for lamentation, Kansas succumbs. Drawn down by anklets of DDT, the jayhawk circles lower and lower while the sludge moils and crests. Now we are about to lose our voices we remember that tomorrow is our echo. O the old songs, the good days: bad faith and civil disobedience, sloppy scholarship and tooth decay. Now the age of footnotes is ours. Ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid. While the rivers thickened and fish rose like vomit, the students of water stamped each fish with its death date. Don’t let a chance like this go by, they thought, though it went by as everything went by—towers of water flecked by a confetti of topsoil, clucked tongues, smug prayers. What we paid too much for and too little attention to, our very lives, all jumbled now and far too big in aggregate to understand or mourn, goes by, and all our eloquence places its weight on the spare word goodbye.

after Richard Wilbur The opposite of walk? A psychic with a crystal ball and tarot deck who sees green when your palm is read. At the sign of a red palm I don’t walk, I run.

From an epigram by Plato When I was a boy, a relative Asked for me a job At the Weeks Cemetery. Think of all I could Have raised that summer, That money, and me Living at home, Fattening and getting Ready to live my life Out on my knees, humming, Kneading up docks And sumac from Those flawless clerks-at-court, those beautiful Grocers and judges, the polished Dead of whom we make So much. I could have stayed there with them. Cheap, too. Imagine, never To have turned Wholly away from the classic Cold, the hill, so laid Out, measure by seemly measure clipped And mown by old man Albright The sexton. That would have been a hell of A way to make a living. Thank you, no. I am going to take my last nourishment Of measure from a dark blue Ripple on swell on ripple that makes Its own garlands. My dead are the secret wine jars Of Tyrian commercial travelers. Their happiness is a lost beginning, their graves Drift in and out of the Mediterranean. One of these days The immortals, clinging to a beam of sunlight Under water, delighted by delicate crustaceans, Will dance up thirty-foot walls of radiance, And waken, The sea shining on their shoulders, the fresh Wine in their arms. Their ships have drifted away. They are stars and snowflakes floating down Into your hands, love.

By the sparklet of certain ciliates cesium practices its cricket song. Am I supposed to be impressed? My smoothie comes with gps . Take a left at that crustacean. You—yes, you, with the crisis Isis eyes. By Odin’s beard, this is snowier than usual. We can always burn the first folio. Go bug a dandelion. You’ll have the elephant of surprise.

Now that the theoretical physicist slash cosmologist has explained to me, has laid out in clean even rows of logic how every atom in my body arrived from a star, a star that blasted apart, and the atoms of my left hand originated from a different sun than my right, I can shine. I can go dark recalling how my grandfather made the vertical blinds rattle when he shoved my grandmother into them. Startled in the yard, I turned to that sound, from the flower bed my eyes were held by the swaying blinds. It took a while for each to line up perfectly straight again, to tell myself she slipped. Only then could I return to stalking the butterflies. My right hand was quick: reach and pinch. I had so many soft wings that summer between my thumb and index, so many of them skewered on cactus needles. I was a kid. I was cruel slash gentle. He was cruel slash gentle. He had witnessed my destroying and I saw across his creased face empathy for them. After his scolding I placed one dead one inside the white envelope of a flower. Under the sun it glowed. Under the moon, more glowing.