767 Humor poems

Glory be to God for sexy things— For cries of coupled lovers as they bind and bow; For moles that on her hip’ll make his dolphin swim, Fresh and fired up; nutty balls; G-strings; Lovescapes pulsing and flesh-shoaled—furrow and plow; And all shapes, their leer and freckle and whim. All people dumpy, bald, regressive, strange; Whoever is fickle, faithful (who knows how?) With slick, abrasive; sweet, sour; disheveled, trim; Who father-forth and mother-forth all change— Praise Him.

In England once there lived a big And wonderfully clever pig. To everybody it was plain That Piggy had a massive brain. He worked out sums inside his head, There was no book he hadn’t read, He knew what made an airplane fly, He knew how engines worked and why. He knew all this, but in the end One question drove him round the bend: He simply couldn’t puzzle out What LIFE was really all about. What was the reason for his birth? Why was he placed upon this earth? His giant brain went round and round. Alas, no answer could be found, Till suddenly one wondrous night, All in a flash, he saw the light. He jumped up like a ballet dancer And yelled, “By gum, I’ve got the answer!” “They want my bacon slice by slice “To sell at a tremendous price! “They want my tender juicy chops “To put in all the butchers’ shops! “They want my pork to make a roast “And that’s the part’ll cost the most! “They want my sausages in strings! “They even want my chitterlings! “The butcher’s shop! The carving knife! “That is the reason for my life!” Such thoughts as these are not designed To give a pig great peace of mind. Next morning, in comes Farmer Bland, A pail of pigswill in his hand, And Piggy with a mighty roar, Bashes the farmer to the floor . . . Now comes the rather grizzly bit So let’s not make too much of it, Except that you must understand That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland, He ate him up from head to toe, Chewing the pieces nice and slow. It took an hour to reach the feet, Because there was so much to eat, And when he’d finished, Pig, of course, Felt absolutely no remorse. Slowly he scratched his brainy head And with a little smile, he said, “I had a fairly powerful hunch “That he might have me for his lunch. “And so, because I feared the worst, “I thought I’d better eat him first.”

When you take your pill it’s like a mine disaster. I think of all the people lost inside of you.

☽ Not to Be Despised A Hyundai when hitchhiking. Peanuts when traveling coach. Support hose at forty. Dishonorable discharge. Water from a gas-station sink. ☽ For a third day in a row the doorbell rings just as I am finally settling down to do some work. I resolve to settle the matter once and for all. The man on my stoop holds a shovel in one hand and  in the other, his hat. An old pillowcse stuffed with something bulky—empty beer cans?—rests on the welcome mat at his feet. For twenty bucks, he offers to clear the front walk. Behind him, snowy steps descend to an icy path winding between a dead hydrangea and the Subaru parked, as usual, a little too close to  the fence. My husband, I recall, will not be home until late. The forecast tonight is more snow. I show the man the contents of my wallet—two crumpled fives and one single—which he accepts, bowing slightly. I nod and withdraw behind the locked door. Eleven dollars, I reflect as I return to the keyboard with my tepid kombucha, isn’t bad for a half-hour’s effort. If he works fast, he could be done in twenty minutes. When I take a cupcake break in the kitchen moments later, however, I spy him out the sliding glass door, dragging his shovel behind him down the street, my icy walkway, to all appearances, untouched. Fair enough, I say, jangling my pajama pocket full of loose change. ☽ Pillow is a funny word, Her Majesty announces in the rosy glow of  her nightlight. So is Word. She sits up wide-eyed and smiles.Word is a funny word, she repeats. So is Funny! So is Goodnight,  I intone from the doorway, and dissolve in the dark. ☽ Guilty Pleasures Beating a child at checkers. Peeing in swimming pools. Watching Dateline. Drinking milk from the carton. Glimpsing one’s neighbor at home in her curlers. Glimpsing one’s neighbor at home in her curlers, watching Dateline, drinking milk from the carton. A roaring fire in July. ☽ Questionable Gestures To haggle with hookers. To roast a bride. Tax-deductible gifts. To supplement a hunger strike with juice. A post-doc at Yale School of Medicine’s Center for Obesity Research sponsored by Pizza Hut. Golden parachutes. Faux fur. Blush on a corpse. ☽ Last night I had a dream so vivid I didn’t bother to record it on my pillow. I was sipping a large stein of sangria at some sort of nightmarish gala, leaning on the arm of a once-powerful older man I’d met in college, upon whom I was now, in the dream, in the awkward position of passing literary judgment. He was wearing a white guayabera shirt with pink stitching, and what hair of his remained was slicked across a forehead speckled with age. I woke angry and aroused and could not get back to sleep. Was this a Prophetic Dream? A Psychological Healing Dream? A Belief Dream? The only option I could rule out for certain was a Dream of Daily Life. ☽ Incongruous A vegan in Vegas. A poor plastic surgeon. Tempests with names like “Trudy” and “Ted.” Perfume at a funeral. Military dolphins. Black balloons. Light rock. ☽ I read a message last night from a woman I have yet to meet beyond the dim glow of a list-serv. She lives in Tampa, if memory serves, and won a juried prize last year for a mixed-media meditation on habitat loss across America, including charts, chants, photographs, oral histories, crowdfunded films, and salvaged trash. She tracks the migratory patterns of purple martins above Wal-Mart parking lots and graphs the spawning grounds of Northern leopard frogs from the Gulf Stream waters to the redwood forests. She posts quarterly reports on her blog. She now finds herself, she confessed last night, in the unfamiliar position of lacking words. While dropping off her child at preschool yesterday, she explained,  she learned from a social worker stationed in the foyer about the sudden death, on Wednesday night, of a boy in the class. An accident at home, is all she knows. The details remain undisclosed. The toddlers have been told that ther friend now lives inside their hearts. What does that mean, her daughter wants to know. What does it mean that he is in our hearts? She doesn’t want Sam inside her, her daughter insists. Sam picks his nose. She doesn’t want Sam’s boogies polluting her heart. At a loss for words myself, I don’t reply. I sit at Her Majesty’s bedside that night and watch snowy pillows pile upon the peeling deckhairs outside. ☽ Better By Moonlight Equestrian statues. Landfills. The Grand Canyon. Sex after forty. Lawn furniture. Travel plans. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

and turn the senior citizen center into an automated assembly line. Goodbye, dross of long winter nights. Farewell, old skin cells and reek: what couldn’t come clean on a clothesline. Bundles of pillows, caroming, bouncing, sloshing along, even as more mistresses of pillows hurry through the door, hugging stained sacks of feathers like thoughts kept well past prime. Sure, they should’ve been thrown out long ago but—we paid so dearly for them.

1. Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet Are bronze casts of the former queen’s feet its sheen A sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through Where the marble is worn away with industrious Polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny some say Because the queen does not want room for splashing The maid thinks otherwise she knows the king Does not grip the queen nightly in his arms there are Others the queen does not have lovers she obeys Her mother once told her your ancestry is your only Support

Diarrhea: what nobody likes, though a word the French love to pronounce. They surround it with lips and tongue; it pleases, like saying cellar door does. Once I gave a pair of tweezers to an au pair girl who couldn’t extract a splinter from her foot. It was a pleasure for both of us to see that little thing come out.

When I can’t make you understand I repeat myself I repeat If you don’t stop asking me all these questions how Will I understand anything Please refrain from talking during the movie I need a life that isn’t just about needing To escape my life Please God please may Carrie please fall for me I want to show off my hidden camera I’m an informer but I have my limits You hurt him once before now what If she’s there I don’t know if I can go Please refrain from talking during the movie Leave a message if you can’t reach me To exit press enter and don’t forget your receipt When I think I read new things I want A life where I read and think new things Please refrain from talking during the movie I want to know nothing Again Please God please may Carrie please fall for me I repeat myself when I can’t Make you understand I repeat

I dunno yer highfalutin' words, but here's th' way it seems When I'm peekin' out th' winder o' my little House o Dreams; I've been lookin' 'roun' this big ol' world, as bizzy as a hive, An' I want t' tell ye, neighbor mine, it's good t' be alive. I've ben settin' here, a-thinkin' hard, an' say, it seems t' me That this big ol' world is jest about as good as it kin be, With its starvin' little babies, an' its battles, an' its strikes, An' its profiteers, an' hold-up men—th' dawggone little tykes! An' its hungry men that fought fer us, that nobody employs. An' I think, "Why, shucks, we're jest a lot o' grown-up little boys!" An' I settle back, an' light my pipe, an' reach fer Mother's hand, An' I wouldn't swap my peace o' mind fer nothin' in the land; Fer this world uv ours, that jest was made fer folks like me an' you Is a purty good ol' place t' live—say, neighbor, ain't it true?

During Napoleon iii’s coup d’état one of  his officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, “Ma sacrée toux! (my damned cough).” But his lieutenant, understanding him to say “Massacrez tous! (massacre them all),” gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly. —Guy Murchie “He was mortared to death.” A pity, how we misspeak and mishear. —Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either makes a difference to the increasingly cooler downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what do