767 Humor poems

for Amiri Baraka Old Ark, how funky it was, all those animals, two of every kind, and all that waste, the human shit somebody had to clean up. Somebody, some love you hugged before fear, the fear of an in-sani-nation, the No Blues, ruined your bowels. Go devil. Public programs like Race. Dems a Repub of Dumpster Molesters, Congressional whole-part bidders on your ugliest clown. Left wing, right, the missing moderates of flightless fight. Private like the Runs. God evil. Somebody had to clean that shit up. Somebody, some love who raised you, wise. Feathered razors for eyebrows, alto, tenor. Wasn’t no branch. Some say a tree, not for rest either. For change. When was we a wild life, long-eared and short. Prey, some prayed for the flood. And were struck by floating, corporate quintets of Rocks and Roths, assets bond Prestige. First Organizer ever called a Nigga, Noah, but not the last Occupier of Ararat ... got thick on Genesis and electric cello, cell-phone-shaped UFOs fueled by the damp, murdered clay of divinity-based Racial Mountain Dirt. Somebody had to clean that shit up. Some native body, beside the smooth water, like a brook Gwen say, “I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them.” Chaser if you straight. Ark Old Ark New Ark Now Only                                  Only Sidney P                           Simple JessB would                                would ____ Spencer T              ____ Dizzy G to turn                               to accent the dinner                         the p’s cheek.                                not the “ ... nuts.” Change the record, Record Changer. Name Change the changing same. Something only you could Art Messenger & dig in any chord. High water, like the woods of secrecy, always a trail a ways a coming. God evil. Move the “d.” Go devil. The Mosque watchers know. Also de wind, de wind and de Word, spoken and written, hidden in love with the intestines of  Testament. Eyes like a woman’s fist, her hard facts — not the crying, domestic consonants “of non being.” Soprano, piano, or the cultural cowardice of class, in any chord of standardized “sheeit” music, lowcoup risks slit. Though flawed, too, by penetrable flesh, some blue kind. Unlike a pretty shield, loaded free. Wasn’t just Winter or lonely. Those. Wasn’t just Sundays the living did not return. Crouch if you a bum or one of  Mumbo Jumbo’s reckless, poisonous reeds. A neck crow man ser vant n a jes’ grew suit. Us am, an unfit second Constitution. Us am, an ambulance full of ... broke-down, as round as we bald. Obeying hawkish eagles. Why the young Brothers so big, what they eatin’, why they blow up like that, gotta wear big white tees, gotta wear white- skin sheets, like maggots, like lard, the domestic oil of death and klan sweat, who blew them up, doctored, who pickin’ them off like dark cotton, make them make themselves a fashion of profitable, soft muscular bales, somebody got to clean this shit up. All us, us animals, on one floating stage we knew was a toilet, the third oldest in the nation, unreserved. Wasn’t no bank or branch. Yes we Vatican, despite Alighieri’s medium rare, rate of interest. It was confirmation. Some say black fire wood. Some love that changed our screaming Atlantic bottoms when all we could be was thin olive sticks with battered whore-ti-cultural beaks, and eastern screech. Flushed, too, every time the Yew Norker or one of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s traitorous X Jedi Clampett hillbillies fresh prince’d us    ... The real religion, our “individual expressiveness” wasn’t dehuman-u-factured by a Greek HAARP in a Roman uni-dot-gov-versity. Where we Away our Steel, “flood” means “flow.” Where we Tenure our Ammo, “podium” means “drum.” Flood, flow. Podium, drum. Flood, drum. Podium, flow. Drum, podium. Flood, flow. Used to be a whole lot of chalk around the Ark, then anger, then angels, their wings made of fried white dust, fallen from when the board of knowledge was public and named after a stranger or rich crook, an anti-in immigrant-can’tameter stretched across the teepee-skin, chairs of class where we clapped the erasers, fifty snows old, like we were the first Abraham, where we clapped the Race Erasers and drove away from K  James V and K Leo PB in shiny Lincolns, sprinkling holy sheeple from the sky, their powdery absolute Rule. Just add oil-water. Belongs to humanity. Just add sugar-rubber. Belongs to civilization. Gold. Days. Nights. Ounces. A forty. Mules move. A forty. Move. Move. Move mule. Whatchamacall “how we here,” and get no response ... how we ... where we fear, how we hear how we sound and how sometimes time is some even our own sound fears us, and remembers the first us, confronting Columbus with thunderbolts,  when “was-we” not good- citizen sober, “was-we”voting and drowning,  and rotting like “we-was” the armed guts of our young? Now a daze, tribe-be-known, the devil the best historian we got. Anyhow.

My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps You’d care to join us?

My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, and likes to rent her movies, for a treat. It makes some evenings harder to enjoy. The list of actresses who might employ him as their slave is too long to repeat. (My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, Paulette Goddard, coy Jean Arthur with that voice as dry as wheat ...) It makes some evenings harder to enjoy. Does he confess all this just to annoy a loyal spouse? I know I can’t compete. My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy. And can’t a woman have her dreamboats? Boy, I wouldn’t say my life is incomplete, but some evening I could certainly enjoy two hours with Cary Grant as my own toy. I guess, though, we were destined not to meet. My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy, which makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

A mutable shape stating that downtime hasn’t gone the way of the dodo. Yet the days of sitting around seem extinct. Now it’s all go-go. No need to go into it; who doesn’t know the feeling? The dodo, maybe? Its temporality is other. Its inability to adapt rendered it obsolete. And so this prop here is adaptable as if to right evolutionary wrongs. It encourages a certain flight, of the sitter’s focus inward, when tilting back, and when sitting straight, to one’s surroundings, an outrospection. English? Both ways must be had, or else ... All hinging on a lever and a handle, not as foolproof as the nod to Alice might lead you to believe. Some groping under the seatback and trial and error is required. And there’s no how-to either. “The best way to explain it is to do it.” Feet on the ground, it’s the drama of everyday living. Feet up, it’s the island of the mind, the dwelling place for other dodos whose existence only pictures and written accounts 
corroborate. Change or die. Who wants to go back to zero again?

A half-view of greenery, cut off by blinds. Pinecones hanging in pairs, like testicles. Brain balls, someone once said at a pool. We were in it, looking up at a guy getting out. This angle replicates that one, but the view is more animated, less peopled. The sky’s changeups are reminders that this will not drag on forever, despite the ergonomic ease afforded by the seat first devised for geriatric care, then stripped down. It’d seem rational: if the elderly spent their days in recliners, so could others, dot-commers, say, properly incentivized. And at least there is no symbolic logic, with eliminands and retinends. No lasting premises either; we will be priced out of any area. No sooner than the conclusion is accepted as consequent and part and parcel of this universe of discourse, we’ll come to realize the sense in having new places to leave. This is the chair’s democracy. Particularly this one, with its form-fitting mesh forsaking foam and padding, which cause overheating and cloud the sitter’s judgment. It’s recyclable, and that matters. Still, the office chair’s revolution is an oxymoron.

It was such a lovely day Till I stumbled in the way Of a van that carries vinegar to stores. When I glared up at the man— Operator of the van— He said, “Vinegar, it never rains but pours!” Now a skunk was standing by. And I thought that I would cry From the vinegar that sprayed and soaked my clothes, When the driver kindly yells, “Watch that animal. It smells!”— And the skunk ran off, a hankie to her nose.

The conversations of the French Quarter mules in their stables after a full day of pulling tourists and voters over cobble- stones is not espresso witty and in their dark no TVs feed them news of the ends of mules elsewhere in the Middle East and West. In our stables the ends of others are a fact of atmosphere. The yoyos on the mystery island nextdoor are revving familiar tools in backyard now gripped by failure first of electricity than of a meaner something that’ll grow into nothing we’ll know in the A.M. Once they were visitors like us then they grew mulish in their bubbles and pulled whatever was put around their necks in- cluding a banner that said, About What Kills Us We Know Little. On certain nights after a good internal fight we hear the voice- less others through the glass fearfully sweet’n’soft like dough. Oh let the monsters in. Help us rise above our not seeing them, may they let us into their eyes as well. Banish the blindness of these cobblestones, clop, clop. But! Pffsst! Our notes are in- complete. Loving you was never on the agenda. Better to sing as roughly as the stones. On Memorial Day we had one thousand hotdogs & counting. Didn’t visit a single graveyard. We the Grant Wood folks scan the sky for incoming missiles: blips ourselves we understand timing and touring in America. The gilded dads in the portraits sought the idealized continuity now moving before us democratically in showers of pixels and dots. I’ll go with the distracted mariner, my lover, and we’ll be in the world. It will be late by then and dark. We lyric virgin mules keep our book of hours in a dream apart, having stranded a billion turistas. But we could not break the chummy hand. Ready to brave the snow without a hat, severe weather notwithstanding, we merely nod and understand.

I wish my frank and open face Held just one tiny little trace Of something that approaches guile. I'd like an enigmatic smile And heavy-lidded eyes instead Of just a regulation head.

Does no dishes, dribbles sauce across the floor. Is more dragon than spaniel, more flammable than fluid. Is the loosening in the knit of me, the mixed-fruit marmalade in the kitchen of me. Wakes my disco and inner hibiscus, the Hector in the ever-mess of my Troy. All wet mattress to my analysis, he’s stayed the loudest and longest of any houseguest, is calling now as I write this, tiny B who brings the joy.

Strong ankled, sun burned, almost naked, The daughters of California Educate reluctant humanists; Drive into their skulls with tennis balls The unhappy realization That nature is still stronger than man. The special Hellenic privilege Of the special intellect seeps out At last in this irrigated soil. Sweat of athletes and juice of lovers Are stronger than Socrates’ hemlock; And the games of scrupulous Euclid Vanish in the gymnopaedia.