767 Humor poems

A chicken soup for the rainbow lover’s soul. A chicken soup for the lover of chicken soup. A carnage of birds, a devastation. Chicken soup for the dried-up garden— It’s been a lousy summer sucking us dry. Chicken soup for the grocery list. Chicken soup for unwanted potatoes. Chicken soup for extinct animals. In the west, the sun sets upon chicken soup. With or without noodles or rice or barley, Or vegetables—canned or otherwise— Carrots and celery or egg drop chicken soup— Chicken eggs, of course—or the alphabet Or chili sauce. Chicken soup for chili lovers, For the spicy soul. Chicken butchered & boiled specifically for your cold. A chicken soup for the cold soul, A chicken soup for the sole of your shoe. A chicken soup for decision making: Does she love me?  Or love me not? Knots tied with chicken soup. Chicken soup tied and sold in knots. 38 ways to tie your soup, to be tied. Chicken soup for the protection of others. A prayer to chicken soup, may it bring me A winning lottery ticket. Chicken soup For recovering alcoholics who still Need hydration. A hydrangea’s Chicken soup—to be loved like no other. A chicken soup for Barry Bonds— May he break Hank Aaron’s record. Stick a pin in the chicken soup & bet On its opponent. 30-Love. Match point. A chicken soup for winners. A chicken soup for losers. Chicken soup for those who tie or draw. The 60-plus occupations of soup. Chicken for Sue, born in the year Of the snake. The snake that ate An alligator and died. They both died. A chicken soup for the one who is eaten. A chicken soup for the one who eats Things other than chicken soup. Transcending the bowl. A meta-bowl Chicken soup for the transcended bowl. Chicken soup for the transcending soup. Chicken soup for the Marxist, steering Away from values associated with heirarchies. Chicken soup for the mud wrestler, The roller derby queen. Chicken soup For dairy queen, for the queen of hearts, For Lady Di and the paparazzi, For clean and dirty kings and queens. For kiwis with wings, for the royal Food pyramid. Chicken soup in January, it’s so nice To slip upon the sliding ice.

Dreaming of one day being as fearless as a mango. As friendly as a tomato. Merciless to chin & shirtfront. Realizing I hate the word “sip.” But that’s all I do. I drink. So slowly. & say I’m tasting it. When I’m just bad at taking in liquid. I’m no mango or tomato. I’m a rusty yawn in a rumored year. I’m an arctic attic. Come able & ampersand in the slippery polar clutter. I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be. I am a gay sipper, & my mother has placed what’s left of her hope on my brothers. She wants them to gulp up the world, spit out solid degrees, responsible grandchildren ready to gobble. They will be better than mangoes, my brothers. Though I have trouble imagining what that could be. Flying mangoes, perhaps. Flying mango-tomato hybrids. Beautiful sons.

William cut a hole in his Levi’s pocket so he could flop himself out in class behind the girls so the other guys could see and shit what guts we all said. All Konga wanted to do over and over was the rubber band trick, but he showed everyone how, so nobody wanted to see anymore and one day he cried, just cried until his parents took him away forever. Maya had a Hotpoint refrigerator standing in his living room, just for his family to show anybody who came that they could afford it. Me, I got a French kiss, finally, in the catholic darkness, my tongue’s farthest half vacationing loudly in another mouth like a man in Bermudas, and my body jumped against a flagstone wall, I could feel it through her thin, almost nonexistent body: I had, at that moment, that moment, a hot girl on a summer night, the best of all the things we tried to do. Well, she let me kiss her, anyway, all over. Or it was just a flagstone wall with a flaw in the stone, an understanding cavity for burning young men with smooth dreams— the true circumstance is gone, the true circumstances about us all then are gone. But when I kissed her, all water, she would close her eyes, and they into somewhere would disappear. Whether she was there or not, I remember her, clearly, and she moves around the room, sometimes, until I sleep. I have lain on the desert in watch low in the back of a pick-up truck for nothing in particular, for stars, for the things behind stars, and nothing comes more than the moment: always now, here in a truck, the moment again to dream of making love and sweat, this time to a woman, or even to all of them in some allowable way, to those boys, then, who couldn’t cry, to the girls before they were women, to friends, me on my back, the sky over me pressing its simple weight into her body on me, into the bodies of them all, on me.

It’s all the rage to sport waxed moustaches and cure your own sausages in some mildewy basement that formerly would have hosted convulsively awkward parties with spin the bottle and seven minutes in the dark and terrifying closet (aka heaven) but now boasts soppressata strung on repurposed vintage drying racks and fat clay pots of kombucha and curdling hops. Personally I've never recovered from the sex-shaped void left in those closets by all the groping that should have occurred to me but didn't: right under my nose kids my age were creeping into adulthood one clammy, trembling palm on one breast at a time. There was also the horror of not being chosen in gym. It is conceivable that learning intricately how to butcher an entire hog and render every morsel might give one a feeling of mastery one lacked in childhood. It is the greatest immaturity to believe suffering entitles you to something someone wiser and grayer than I once said. But in those basements and carpools and playgrounds as I assassinated one by one clandestinely my torturers abandoning their foul normal bodies to compost the astonishing tedium of the wending suburban lanes, I was transubstantiating to supernal fame and beauty and such eerie genius that entire books were written about my books. In fact it takes a long time to realize your suffering is of very little consequence to anyone but you. And by that time the future is already happening and you're pickling okra and starfruit and foraging for morels in urban forests and suspending artisan mozzarella in little wet nets and crafting small-batch, nitrite-free data and maybe even thinking about having children, which you swore in a million billion years you would never do.

Essay #1 Mrs. Goldberg’s AP Intro to Lit Shakespeare understood the blues. He knew parting was such sweet sorrow. Mr. Shakespeare was the main MC Of the Elizabethan scene and so I figure To be or not to be (similar to how you be?) Be as timeless as hell and as universal Since such questions never go out of style. I only wish Othello had sussed out Iago And taken Iago down to the crossroads And asked Iago the devil’s true-true name. Juliet is like Lady Gaga (in my HBO rewrite) And Romeo lives in Harlem with his moms — Though that’s only his nom-de-plume. He wants to be the first rapper with a PhD. And Robert Burns smiles to keep from crying And when he penned the best-made plans Of mice and men (not rats) often go astray What he really meant was shit happens. Dead Old White Men they knew the blues Though they didn’t always know what They knew okay maybe not even in 1619 By which time Shakespeare was Auld Lang Syne and Burns was not yet in this world But the blues isn’t stuck on color or CP time.

A sudden not-breeze fills the air. Two men dressed in corduroy approach, one pulling a boat. A boat of agony. Heigh-ho. Greeting. Greeting. Fleeting smile, both. The word smile left on the faces of the fourth wall. How to read that? The optic nerve gets it up. What has been done weighs the heigh. The smarter of the men has a dollar hanging from a pocket. Acquisitive or generous? Balance implies a man out of sight line removing his shoes. Why a man? is the question. The philosopher in the second row wants to punch the usher. Such restraint stupefies the audience into paradoxical sleep. They worry but their eyeballs still roll. And if the heavens help with a hole in the roof above the lights: drip, drip, the two men look to the exit, shamed, unwilling to follow one or the other without a speech. Let us bury Caesar. I hope we find some sand.

Do not a civilization make. Do they? Cozy up to the fleece of a sheep, take the lid off Elizabeth Bishop’s head and get a spoon. Do not eat yet; do not swoon. There will be hours for that. First there is a long war march. Then there are other animals to press into the barn before the lightning storm comes to cook the grass and rinse it and make a mess. But this is all outside and you need never go there. Can you ride a tin? Yes, you can, says the child detective. The poet lies under the sheep, reading of Robert Menzies, his wife Pattie, and their pets. “We had a lovely weekend,” they tell reporters. Just months later their cat’s dead. Robert turns from the golden syrup, while deciding whether to use a knife or a spoon, the television on though it’s only 8 am . Elizabeth was reading her poetry aloud into a woolly microphone. She thought she saw the top of Robert’s head pass by the window. She was thinking of the story “Marmosets” she was translating, by Clarice Lispector. A spirit moved out of the shadows and found an unopened tin in the cupboard and threw it at the window, causing the monkeys on the verandah to flee from the glass. You can hear it on the recording at PennSound. A shearer found glass in a sheep’s fleece months later. “Lucky.” “Why lucky?” “Lucky it didn’t take your thumb off.” That was what Bishop heard about it. She wanted something to give to Clarice. Something in wool or a painting. She saw the earth tipping up, as if she was falling over while looking out the window, and she was traveling to Australia via a flying tin of golden syrup, where there were sheep all ready to cushion her, but it wasn’t necessary for she fell into the arms of the Prime Minister. “Tilted space age pastoral,” she thought, but “marmoset” was what she murmured up at him. He could hear his wife crying that their cat was dead. “It was bloody ASIO!” she bawled. Saying sorry, he dropped the unexpected visitor on the lawn and went to his wife’s aid. He spread one of the scones he’d baked earlier and made a fresh pot. “I don’t want any of that ASIO muck,” Pattie grizzled. Robert turned to Elizabeth to see if she could hear, ready to explain how upset his wife was. Elizabeth had found a curious black spread in the cupboard and was helping herself. “That’s not food,” baa’d the sheep detective. Lightning struck where they’d been sitting just minutes before. “Life is not flat, that’s for sure,” Elizabeth thought to herself, remembering the sheep in the window back home, and starting to write a poem. It would be about flying through the air, and strange food, and the floury arms of a patriarch.

Considering the frequency with which I take people’s words out of context, lie through my teeth and smear anyone who doesn’t hew to my philosophy of division and contempt, I’d prefer my candidate of choice to stay on the high road, but there’s a certain element of fighting fire with dilemmas, not just for me, but for any candidate. Is it more important to lose honorably, or to get into the gutter with your own particularity when so much is the answer? I love the pumpkin idea. I will definitely use that and I also plan on making the “kielbasa launcher.” I already have a guacamole rifle and it’s the same thing, I just need to figure out how to do it. If you have ideas for that please help. Also on the splitting heads thing they have that hydraulic wrench that rips the brain chunks out of the head you can do that so much easier just get the fishing line attached to the fragments and then fill a two to three liter soda bottle with sand and throw it in the opposite direction your life is going. To see the results of this oscillatory combustion phenomenon between the acoustics of the cavity and the pyrolysis of the propellants which were used in irreproducible ignition which I never liked much anyway. I couldn’t decipher myself. Too bad. I have typed out some abbreviated remains where my old life used to be, but I’m still living in them as if they were a book. I spent the afternoon reveling and wondering what I need to do to get my own sheep. I saw sheep herding and shearing, admired the baby lambs, and followed the “from sheep to sweater” interpretive trail.

Four square monks drive a Coupe de Ville Through the vale, over the hill To get to where the savings are, They square their shoulders and point the car They bang their heads when the radio blares That song about the lady who bought the stairs And the dandy in back swirls down the chrome handle To cast weird sun on his pilgrim sandal Where tokens once slurried to a buttercup Hajj What now? O shimmering mercantile Alcatraz! Mobius ministries fringe the haze Of toothbrush choirs in a Yangtze glaze Foaming in pollens of this lobotomized valley Ever since Yankee Candle broke up Bee’s Alley Where skanking confederates Did trail natty satins, debt Free, and Sanity herself (Now a scent, top-shelf) Administered to gutter pirate queens Mini homecomings woven on the cosmic screen And whispered in a turtle’s ear, Kid monk you dream, it was the beer You vowed to brew Just like the thread will lose its screw Just like the brain will shed its wrinkles, Diverting shipwreck’s periwinkles To be reborn in a lonely place, Truth’s best conducted by an unclaimed face

Bedfordshire A blue bird showing off its undercarriage En route between our oldest universities Was observed slightly off-course above Woburn In the leafy heart of our sleepiest county: Two cyclists in tandem looked up at the same moment, Like a busy footnote to its asterisk. Berkshire Once on the causeway outside Steventon I had a vision of living in willing exile, Of living the knowingly imperfect life But with a boundless and joyous energy Like Borodin played by the North Berkshire Youth Orchestra in its early days. Buckinghamshire A goose in the garden of the second-best pub In Marsh Gibbon was busy doing its dirty toothpaste And noisy, too, when a woman staggered out Of the lounge bar into the deserted car-park Saying: ‘I could never think of the child at my breast As anything other than a penis with a mouth.’ Cambridgeshire The bird arrived. Nothing so stately-exciting As Handel’s dusky queen that was unspooling Perhaps too loudly from a scribbling student cell, But looped between the trees, a flash of green: And only the having chanced to look just there Could tell you it had ever been away. Cheshire There was a young woman of Cheadle, who wore her heart Upon her sleeve, bright chevron! Oh, the keen-eyed Men of Cheadle, as in the jealous month When the registration numbers of new estate cars Change all over wealthy suburban Cheshire, And they picked out her heart with a needle. Cornwall The very last cat to speak Cornish had a glass eye And kept a corner shop, selling shoe-laces and bullseyes, Brasso and Reckitt’s Blue. My great-aunt remembers Buying postcards from him as a girl, When George’s profile sped them for a penny. Aching to talk, he died of pure loneliness. Cumberland They play bezique in Threlkeld and they play For keeps in Shap. And all the shapely clouds Roll through the streets like weeping chemistry Or cows escaped. And tea is served in the lounge Over a jig-saw puzzle of the Princess Elizabeth Beneath wet panes, wet mountains and wet sky. Derbyshire Once upon a time, in Derbyshire’s leaking basement Where you lie back in boats and quant by walking the ceiling, A strange girl in the dripping darkness attached Her damp lips to mine fast, like a snail’s adherence To cold stone in dusty nettles, and all unseeen The bluejohn slid by me: yellows, greys and purples. Devon You will never forget the fish market at Barnstaple: Wet gills, double bellies, gleaming scales, Shells like spilt treasure. And the cream there thicker Than a virgin’s dream, and Devon’s greatest poet Born Gay, on Joy Street, taught by Robert Luck: It is the paradise of all fat poets. Dorset When the old woman entered the sea at Charmouth And the great waves hung over her head like theatre curtains, I thought of the sibyl who charmed the rocks to yield Their grainy secrets till history bore down Upon her and the liquid world was fixed For ever in the era of the fossils. Durham At the end of your battered philosophical quest, The purity of Durham rises like an exhalation, Like the stench of sulphur in a barrel. Birds Build in the walls of the cloisters, disappearing into holes Like black-robed devotees. Inside it is quiet, The oatmeal crimping distant in grey air. Essex I had a vision in the dead of night Of all the kitchens of commuters’ Essex Alight like the heads of snakes; and down them slid The bored wives and daughters of the managers Who were at the identical time arriving On the ladders of their power and fatigue. Gloucestershire Armorial memorials reduced To leper stone, forests to hedges, hedges To sickled stumps where perch the songless birds Of Gloucestershire, and vans require the roads Before them in their headlights. No one speaks In the time it takes to cross the greenest county. Hampshire Driving at evening down the A 34 Like a ski-run, the sun a deiphany, The car-radio a percussive Russian insistence: Pure pleasure, pure escape! Past Winchester, Unseen its stalking scholars, past everything, Driving through Hampshire, driving for the boats! Herefordshire Alone between the Arrow and the Wye, Wales to the west, keeping its rain and secrets, I wandered in cider country, where the shade Beneath the trees is golden red and noisy With the jealous spite of wasps: Ariconium, The poet Philips, his long hair combed out! Hertfordshire Hertfordshire is full of schoolmasters, And archaeologists who are part-time poets. Together they apportion past, present And future among their imaginary admirers In the form of examination papers, foul Drafts, and labels of dubious information. Huntingdonshire Herds of deer are moving through the trees Of Huntingdonshire noisily and rather Slowly. An idle hand sweeping the lyre Brings tears to the eyes of the moderately rich. They will dip their hands in their pockets, gently dip But not too deep. You’ve got to keep money moving. Kent Old men coming up to bowl remember Other old men who in their turn remembered Things that were hardly worth remembering Through long still nights in Ashford, Faversham, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells and Westerham Where even now the fields still smell of beer. Lancashire All the oven doors of Lancashire Swing open on the hour, revealing vast Puddings. After tea, the lovers stroll, Their hands in each other’s back trouser pockets, Feeling the strange swell of the flexing buttock. The sun sinks, and the Ribble runs to the sea. Leicestershire Cheeks of angels, lips compressed, donate To brass invisible impulsions of Purely material breath: a county’s children Gather to create an overture, While brothers and fathers leaping over hedges Wind horns to their alternative conclusion. Lincolnshire M1, M18, M180: the roads With their bright and bowline intersections sweep North to Scunthorpe. Go further if you will To where the Trent meets the Humber and Lincolnshire ends. There, at Alkborough, you may draw breath And if Nicky’s at home she will give you a cup of something. Middlesex Middlesex is mostly roundabouts, the bright Voice of five p.m., insistent infotainment: Fingers gallop irritably on the steering-wheel; The nails make little clicks. Down the line Of fuming stationary Volvos boys bully with headlines That tell the drivers all about the place they have come from. Norfolk Norfolk is somehow inverted: it’s all sky With clouds as bulky as castrati or lines of Dryden Sailing out above you, tinged with sunset. Get as far as you can, but not too far, Say to the Tuesday Market Place at King’s Lynn Where all the conveyancing is done in verse. Northamptonshire Once half-lost here, when only a map of sounds Or smells could lead us from a wood, we came At evening to horse-brass and low-timbered beams Where the world had evolved to its great public state And the men and women of Northampton, being counted And with amber drinks, found themselves to be happy. Northumberland Traitors’ county: from one end to the other You can walk bright-eyed with never a second glance From a stocky frowning people who move slowly And mind their own business. For they have seen it all: When the mist clears over Northumberland It leaves squat towers, valleys scarred with lead. Nottinghamshire There is one red door in one slightly curved Street in one nameless market town That contains behind it for a moment an image Of the planet’s destiny: a girl stooping To a hallway mirror, making her lips move Into a theatrical kiss, a self kiss. Oxfordshire The kingfisher has long flown. Along the Cherwell The biscuit of bridge and college wall is blank Of its image, but with a passing presence Like a photograph taken with an open shutter. This, we reflect, is just the sense of our life, Aware of something the very moment that we miss it. Rutland Rutland is large enough for you and me To stumble into as into a wood without being seen, To tread its moss-starred carpet, enchanted By the chipped china of the russulas, Pink, grey, grey and green-grey, and red, Peeping beneath the oaks, not far from Oakham. Shropshire Shropshire Blue, still made, the Lord be praised, Tart veins that kept the Romans here and Housman From the rope. The iron bridges lead you to it, Farms knee-deep in cow. And if you stop off In red-earthed Bridgnorth, that vigilant town, Be sure your pint is not ungraced with cheese. Somerset A thousand airy harps! We hardly dare To let out breath, for our imagination Responds to these full-throated sounds as though To the ranks of the ever-delighting dead, our wise Visionaries, and this is the county of dreams And of the moon’s occult praesidium. Staffordshire Staffordshire is where you almost came from, Darkened beneath burnt clay, perpetual dusk. It is the housewife’s dream, twinkling hearths Bright with Zebo, scrubbed pumice steps And, in the bathroom, a finger on the nozzle And little lavender farts to begin the day. Suffolk I’ve had Leigh and buried St Edmunds, Stowed Felix and Market and Upland, I’ve been shut up in Boxton, found it painful in Akenham And felt totally stupid in Assingham: Carrying around one’s valuable despair like a fleece, To live in Suffolk is to suffocate. Surrey Flying in perfect formation above the sleeping Cul-de-sacs of Surrey, you observe The blocked pairing of houses, each with a garage, Like epaulettes. What whisperings behind The party walls! What eavesdropping, and what Bad timing! Well done! Sorry, partner! Boom! Sussex Chalk pie, a quality of sun like laughter, Distance predicted in hoof-beats: everywhere here Is vigilance as well as cruel amusement, That tempered island quality called sardonic. From Rye to Selsey Bill, something is on offer, A glittering spread, the bottom drawer pulled out. Warwickshire Driving to Wales I crossed a corner of Warwickshire That seemed to be hardly space at all, the home Of Dr Hall and his famous father-in-law Or of magic woods where lovers were lost and found, But simply the minutes that it took to tell An unimportant story, now forgotten. Westmorland Once again the skies are open over the whole county: From Clifton to Burton, from Grasmere to Brough, The pubtalk steaming with anoraks and orange parkas. But I can remember one solitary eye Raging in silence in the dripping marsh, Its dewy lashes spooning aphids from the air. Wiltshire In Wiltshire they are sending extra-terrestrial Signals: what will the Venusians think of us? Four-footed creatures who like to move in circles? Let’s hope they never noisily discover That we are only half the men they thought us, Stumbling at tangents from our glimpsed perfection. Worcestershire Oh darling, come to Broadway: there we’ll take Tea and scones and jam made from the plums Of Pershore, perfect, pitless, palate-pleasing. A stroll in the model street, a browse at Gavina’s. Then it’s right foot down in the Volvo, plenty of Scotch And the largest bed we can find at the Bull in Worcester. Yorkshire The brown teapot is always warming here For there will be a time when you must come home Though you be unknown except to the flowered dead. On the moors the diagonal smoke rises Like a bitter smile, tight but welcoming: Cousin country, extra places for tea.