767 Humor poems

Standing in line at the SuperSave, it all falls Into place, Princess Di and the aliens and diet Tips from outer space, King Tut and King Elvis, Out of the subfusc air, the rank urgency of dusk, Among the heavy odors of differing dungs, Acrid signatures of urine, the bold perfume of musk . . . Nostradamus, this year's senate race, unforeseen Links between absolutely everything and sex, Conspiracies requiring conspiracy to be detected, From a sibilance of scattered leaves, the sudden Snap of twig, inflections of a gabbling breeze, Horizons stained with dust, the attitude of trees . . . And O my fellow shoppers waiting to check out, What appetite is this that drives such dim belief, What thirst for intercourse between these banal bits? From the cacophony of birds as from abrupt silence, Odd sounds of usual insects, subliminal presence Of added shadow, faintest trembling in the ground . . . When greed and accident stand ever ready to explain, Whence this convolvulus of tenuous connection? What need for the devious when the obvious will do? From remarkable weeds, from a slight imbalance In the normal proportion of game, from distressed bark, Out of the bewildering swirl of importunate sense . . . Attention, shoppers, there lies a veldt within us each, Its grasses rustle with intent, and on that plain Was born the fine suspicion that has carried us so far, To behold the unassuming fact and comprehend design, To look upon confusion and construct its plot and act, To leap at merest notion found floating in the mind . . . Has brought us to these sheltered aisles under thin gray light, Where in boredom and abundance we seek our narrative, Whatever tale comes now to kill us and can creep.

Magic Wayne with flowers; Wanye West; Box-of-Tricks Wayne; Wayne sad on Facebook, proving he loves his daughter; the sporty Wayne — loves himself skinny; Bald Wayne, head like a rocking chair; Amy Waynehouse; Wayne the ironic; Fat Wayne — tits pushed beneath a Fred Perry Wayne; Wayne from near Slough; Ugly Wayne — the unlikely mess of his wife Wayne — canned laughter; Wayne who renamed another Wayne Fleabag; Track-suited Wayne — your hubcaps, his pockets; Home and A-Wayne; Randy Wayne; Wayne, fountains of him, every drop snug to someone’s mum; Wayne, boyfriend of Stacey; Wayne-ker; Wayne the rap star, gold teeth, grime; Wayne the Superhero, Wayne the Cowboy; Dancing Wayne — in tights; It’s-Wayning-Men; a cavalcade of Waynes fucking each other up in a Geoff Hattersley poem — in a pub, in Barnsley; Purple Wayne; Wayne’s World Wayne; Wayne “Sleng Teng” Smith; A-Wayne in a Manger; all of them have stopped what they’re doing, all of them divided in two rows and facing each other, all of them, arms raised, they are linking fingers, all of them: an architrave through which 
I celebrate, marching like I am the bridegroom, grinning like I am the bride

Sometime during eternity some guys show up and one of them who shows up real late is a kind of carpenter from some square-type place like Galilee and he starts wailing and claiming he is hip to who made heaven and earth and that the cat who really laid it on us is his Dad And moreover he adds It’s all writ down on some scroll-type parchments which some henchmen leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres a long time ago and which you won’t even find for a coupla thousand years or so or at least for nineteen hundred and fortyseven of them to be exact and even then nobody really believes them or me for that matter You’re hot they tell him And they cool him They stretch him on the Tree to cool And everybody after that is always making models of this Tree with Him hung up and always crooning His name and calling Him to come down and sit in on their combo as if he is the king cat who’s got to blow or they can’t quite make it Only he don’t come down from His Tree Him just hang there on His Tree looking real Petered out and real cool and also according to a roundup of late world news from the usual unreliable sources real dead

If there’s pee on the seat it’s my pee, battery’s dead I killed it, canary at the bottom

B.D. was a decent poet but difficult to define or for himself to self-divine, a follower, a “gift” the way one seeker, loose but selective, identified himself to an intoxication reading obnubilating poems in a brick-and-river town: a generous, ecstatic overnight. A present, or an absence needing to be present, who tailed me, who mailed women years ago when he was free with his attention, a fixation that he felt attended him. Sometimes several times a week then several times a day he’d write me, for he was free to borrow books, go to the mailbox at 3 a.m., for it was urgent that he send a bride issue of Vogue,Bazaar, (not Seventeen, but Glamour, but not Ms.) from the Heartland where (Don’t forget our wedding date!) he bubble wrapped some trinkets, snapshots — poses of his parakeet beside his own long head meeting at an angle in a steely mirror. His wife, from her wheelchair, had made their camera flash. He tried to kill his wife with a little hammer

I was really in a muddle looking over a mud puddle 'cause I didn't have a paddle or a twig to ride the reef. But I said, Oh, fiddle-faddle, this is just a little piddle of a second fiddle puddle so I saddled up a leaf. I set sail on the puddle, but I reached the muddy middle and I rocked the leaf a little, then I gave it all I had. And I solved the mighty riddle of the whole caboodle puddle when I hopped up on the middle of a beetle launching pad.

Some years ago you heard me sing My doubts on Alexander Byng. His sister Sarah now inspires My jaded Muse, my failing fires. Of Sarah Byng the tale is told How when the child was twelve years old She could not read or write a line. Her sister Jane, though barely nine, Could spout the Catechism through And parts of Matthew Arnold too, While little Bill who came between Was quite unnaturally keen On 'Athalie', by Jean Racine. But not so Sarah! Not so Sal! She was a most uncultured girl Who didn't care a pinch of snuff For any literary stuff And gave the classics all a miss. Observe the consequence of this! As she was walking home one day, Upon the fields across her way A gate, securely padlocked, stood, And by its side a piece of wood On which was painted plain and full, BEWARE THE VERY FURIOUS BULL Alas! The young illiterate Went blindly forward to her fate, And ignorantly climbed the gate! Now happily the Bull that day Was rather in the mood for play Than goring people through and through As Bulls so very often do; He tossed her lightly with his horns Into a prickly hedge of thorns, And stood by laughing while she strode And pushed and struggled to the road. The lesson was not lost upon The child, who since has always gone A long way round to keep away From signs, whatever they may say, And leaves a padlocked gate alone. Moreover she has wisely grown Confirmed in her instinctive guess That literature breeds distress.

Seems there was this Professor a member of what should be called The Good German Department Must have signed his name to 5,000 petitions in front of the Co-Op on Cedar and bought two tons of benefit cookies Blames Texas for the sorry state of the oceans Rode a Greyhound bus “Civil Rights,” Alabama, 1960 Found the long yellow war “deplorable” Believes John “Duke” Wayne’s values to be inferior to his He said, “Ishmael, I’d love to do the right thing for as you know I’m all for the right thing and against the wrong thing, but these plaster of paris busts of deceased Europeans Our secret ways Our sacred fears "These books, leather-bound 'copyright 1789’ All of these things, precious to me, gleaming like the stainless steel coffee urn in the faculty club, an original Maybeck, 1902 “I’d stand up for Camelot by golly, even if it meant shooting all the infidels in the world,” he said reaching into his desk drawer “Why, I might even have to shoot you, Ishmael” Staring down the cold tunnel of a hard .38 I thought Most people are to the right when it comes to where they must eat and lay their heads!

His Grace! impossible! what dead! Of old age too, and in his bed! And could that mighty warrior fall? And so inglorious, after all! Well, since he’s gone, no matter how, The last loud trump must wake him now: And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger, He’d wish to sleep a little longer. And could he be indeed so old As by the newspapers we’re told? Threescore, I think, is pretty high; ’Twas time in conscience he should die This world he cumbered long enough; He burnt his candle to the snuff; And that’s the reason, some folks think, He left behind so great a stink. Behold his funeral appears, Nor widow’s sighs, nor orphan’s tears, Wont at such times each heart to pierce, Attend the progress of his hearse. But what of that, his friends may say, He had those honours in his day. True to his profit and his pride, He made them weep before he died. Come hither, all ye empty things, Ye bubbles raised by breath of kings; Who float upon the tide of state, Come hither, and behold your fate. Let pride be taught by this rebuke, How very mean a thing’s a Duke; From all his ill-got honours flung, Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung.

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying, and I keep expecting some enormous black-and-white B-movie Cyclops to appear at the edge of the horizon, to come striding over the ocean and drag me from my kitchen to the deep cave that flickered into my young brain one Saturday at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless between my older brothers, pumped up on candy and horror—that cave, the litter of human bones gnawed on and flung toward the entrance, I can smell their stench as clearly as the bacon fat from breakfast. This is how it feels to lose it— not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is that helps you get up in the morning and actually leave the house on those days when it seems like death in his brown uniform is cruising his panel truck of packages through your neighborhood. I think of a friend’s voice on her answering machine— Hi, I’m not here— the morning of her funeral, the calls filling up the tape and the mail still arriving, and I feel as afraid as I was after all those vampire movies when I’d come home and lie awake all night, rigid in my bed, unable to get up even to pee because the undead were waiting underneath it; if I so much as stuck a bare foot out there in the unprotected air they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me under. And my parents said there was nothing there, when I was older I would know better, and now they’re dead, and I’m older, and I know better.