767 Humor poems

The morning that the world began The Lion growled a growl at Man. And I suspect the Lion might (If he’d been closer) have tried a bite. I think that’s as it ought to be And not as it was taught to me. I think the Lion has a right To growl a growl and bite a bite. And if the Lion bothered Adam, He should have growled right back at ’im. The way to treat a Lion right Is growl for growl and bite for bite. True, the Lion is better fit For biting than for being bit. But if you look him in the eye You’ll find the Lion’s rather shy. He really wants someone to pet him. The trouble is: his teeth won’t let him. He has a heart of gold beneath But the Lion just can’t trust his teeth.

When Ronnie’s husband stepped out of the shower She spotted bite marks on his buttocks I was so listless I wished the dog could talk

Oddly enough, there is a “Unicorn Pleasure Ring” in existence. Research reveals that Hitler lifted the infamous swastika from a unicorn emerging from a colorful rainbow. Nazi to unicorn: “You’re not coming out with me dressed in that ridiculous outfit.” You can finally tell your daughter that unicorns are real. One ripped the head off a waxwork of Adolf Hitler, police said. April

All can be measured by the standard of the capybara. Everyone is lesser than or greater than the capybara. Everything is taller or shorter than the capybara. Everything is mistaken for a Brazilian dance craze more or less frequently than the capybara. Everyone eats greater or fewer watermelons than the capybara. Everyone eats more or less bark. Everyone barks more than or less than the capybara, who also whistles, clicks, grunts, and emits what is known as his

. . . I drank and was surprised to see what looked like tea leaves at the bottom of the cup . . . minutes later a great warm green wave or cloud began advancing towards me. “Look at the boats on his shirt,” I felt myself trying to say, in Spanish, or Moroccan, yet knowing I knew none of the words . . . it was bright morning, and the train had arrived and emptied at Chamartín before I finally pried open my eyes, and saw on the carriage floor nothing but an unfamiliar pair of trainers: cracked white leather, with three green stripes. “Mister — or rather Herr — Adolf Dassler made these,” I thought. But which of the two friendly men with whom I’d shared the carriage, and some wine, had been wearing them? I pondered this awhile, then fell asleep again . . . and did Herr Dassler visit, personally, all the cities inscribed on his trainers? Koln, Dublin, Paris, Montreal, Kopenhagen, Bern, Amsterdam . . . and fit the trainer to the city? Rom, like these, Vienna, London . . . Señor Dassler, I am dreaming of you on a bench on a platform in a train station in Madrid, unable to wake up, a pair of your trainers, that weren’t mine, but now are, on my feet . . . I am swimming, Herr Dassler, in your wake, though I fear you are dead, a corpse washed clean by the numbing tides with three slanting stripes emblazoned on your chest, your passport and your wallet drifting to the ocean floor . . . I discovered in a pocket — oh! the kindness of strangers! — about forty pesetas; but casting around for a joke or silver lining, I found nada— or niente, as I put it to my shoes . . . closing my eyes, I imagined fingers untying and easing off my Reeboks, as the train hurtled through the darkness, the men trying them on in turn, the ex-owner of these flexing his toes, padding up and down, nodding approval. They must have whispered like parents, as they lifted my shirt and unfastened my money belt, or perhaps, more like surgeons, they used scissors, or a knife . . . snicker-snack! I watched the vorpal blade trace arabesques across my breastbone, hover, then slide between two ribs.Chug-chug went the trains. The heat was building, the potion at last wearing off. How light I’d be, I now began to reason, as quick and canny as a lizard, a perfectly camouflaged lizard, who’d shed a skin and acquired a new way of walking.

Old Parson Beanes hunts six days of the week, And on the seventh, he has his notes to seek. Six days he hollows so much breath away That on the seventh he can nor preach or pray.

Roads around mountains cause we can’t drive through That’s Poetry to Me.

Once, there was a year where every romance had fangs. It was hard to open up a novel without a vampire bearing down on a young, virgin neck. Soon, they were on the television. Later, the sidewalks. Teenagers. They owned us with their hackneyed plots. Platinum fleur-de-lis emblazoned on their jeans. How do they wash them? I asked.They don’t, my friend said.It’s part of what keeps them so dark and stiff. An entire generation has arrived dark and stiff. Unlike my pliable, light, pubescent years. I grew up reading Little House on the Prairie. Sweet, blind Mary stole my heart. Turn the page. Oklahoma. Wild mustangs. Malaria. And Pa. Talk about a hero. Now they have boys so angry they transform into wild, shirtless dogs. They are maniacs, these fans. They beg their mothers to drive them to the theater where they burst into dollars and popcorn in their seats. They want the car tossed off their withering girl bodies. Lured from their couches, they are eager to be taken from their lives and placed directly in the vampire’s mouth. Younger and younger.Cha-ching. Is there nothing anyone can do?

1 I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting. 2 We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing. 3 I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years. The man who asked for it was shabby and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold. 4 Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg. Forgive me. I was clumsy, and I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

You’re clean shaven in this country where trees grow beards of moss, where even bank tellers look a little like banditos in vests as pungent as sweatsuits. Still, you prefer the vegetable air to almost any other place on the map. After the heart attack, you considered Paris— the flying buttresses, the fractured light of its cathedrals; the entire city refined and otherworldly, ascending on its architectural wings— but decided you had no use for glory, boulevards fur-lined with statues and expensive trees. You admit, on the whole, the towns in this country are ugly. One summer you drove toward Nicoya (a beautiful name that became your destination), expecting a fragrant town of mango trees but found cattle grazing in the plaza, rattling the tin plates in the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant. A Coca-Cola sign hung weathered and askew. That’s perhaps why you like it, it’s a country you can’t count on, a country of misfits. Unable to take root in the mud, the twentieth century has failed miserably, creating neither factory nor industry but a thirst for soda pop; like cosmetic surgery, it is skin deep. The clock is stuck in the rain and the mud of four o’clock. There’s nothing to do but wait as if in a dry cave, a room with a view of the waterfall, pinned as you are beneath the downpour. The waiter bends over your cup without filling it, the storekeeper holds your change until the rain, hypnotic and dramatic, leaves the streets and the gutters, the balcony and the air greener, heavier— mildew blooming in the closet where your shoes, powdered with a sea-green lichen, resembles old bronze, a pair of ancient goblets. While iguanas lounge in the attic (a prehistoric version of the domestic rat), the Office of the Ministry (a pink and crumbling building surrounded by dusty rose trees) prints more money to prop the flimsy flowered currency. You can’t predict what your American dollars will bring by morning. In the hotel restaurant you meet the Undesirable American. He learns just enough of the local lingo to swing by, living on a dwindling account and, here and there, a real estate swindle. Or the pensionado who buys two cigars, offering you one the day his Social Security arrives. Like the cockroach, the displaced have crawled through the cracks and selected for themselves an agreeable niche. A place to start from scratch. They thrive in the vegetable air. You wonder how you’ll survive, unfit, unable to work. Lacking the predatory skills, you’ve stayed in the trees, a dreamer, all your life, even now wanting to believe a change of scenery will get you back on your feet. A brief hiatus in the vegetable air. Tonight, you walk along the damp streets, an average steak, a glass of wine swishing in your belly, to your small room wedged between a jukebox and a dance hall. There are so many things you can’t change— like the dull thrashing music. You draw the blinds, switch on the tiny cassette. Silence. The click of the tape. And then the familiar aria, rising like the moon, lifts you out of yourself, transporting you to another country where, for a moment, you travel light.