767 Humor poems

When I was a troubadour When I was an astronaut When I was a pirate You should have seen my closet You would have loved my shoes. Kindly consider my application Even though your position is filled. This is my stash of snow globes This is my favorite whip This is a picture of me with a macaw This is a song I almost could sing. When I was a freight train When I was a satellite When I was a campfire You should have seen the starburst You should have tasted my tomato. I feel sorry for you I’m unqualified This is my finest tube of toothpaste This is when I rode like the raj on a yak This is the gasoline this is the match. When I was Hegel’s dialectic When I was something Rothko forgot When I was moonlight paving the street You should have seen the roiling shore You should have heard the swarm of bees.

My puppy’s in the garden. He loves to smell the flowers. To help them grow my puppy always sprinkles them with showers.

I. The first question is always phrased this way: “So. How much Indian are you?” II. We did not live in tepees. We did not braid our hair. We did not fringe our shirts. We did not wear war bonnets. We did not chase the buffalo. We did not carry shields. We were never Plains Indians. We tried to ride, but we kept falling off of our dogs. III. A local official came to our office to ask our help with a city event. He had a splendid idea, he said. To kick off the event and show everyone in town that our tribe was still around, we should go up to the bluff overlooking the city and make a big smoke signal. Then they would know we were here. Who ever heard of smoke signals in the forests? I imagined us upon the bluff, lighting one of those firestarter bricks. We haven’t made fire since the Boy Scouts took over. And how would the citizens know it was us? They’d probably call the fire department. IV. As they ask, they think,yes, I can see it in her face. High cheekbones (whatever those are)and dark hair. Here’s a thought: don’t we all have high cheekbones? If we didn’t, our faces would cave in. (But I do have a colonized nose.) I’m sick of explaining myself. “You know,” I finally say, “It doesn’t matter to my people.” I ride off to my ranch-style home. Time to weave a basket, or something.

The Guardian reports on a Palestinian businessman who obtained a unanimous fatwa to open a pornography-free online sex shop to help couples reignite their love lives. The imams who approved the venture said: “Islam supports anything that helps a married couple to connect.” I’d like to alert the NSA agents tracking Arab men: anonymous brown paper packages will be delivered to married couples all over the Middle East. Before you call in the Joint Chiefs of Staff let me assure you, our people are starved for love, not bombings. Those late night calls from temporary cell phones? They weren’t plans to attack, just plans to rendezvous bypassing multiple layers of family surveillance. The breathless whispered Arabic on the line? Code: yes, but not sacred verses. Arab love falls under siege. Everywhere is public space and the public are a sober bunch. On our romantic jihads the path is long and arduous and fraught with prying neighbors. We can’t even find a place to take an evening stroll, our war-weary streets dilapidated, our squares overflowing with revolutionary traffic. And even though the garden jasmine pours forth its sultry perfume and a million stars crowd the night skies, everyone is indoors chain-smoking their lives away and watching the news. And the news has been old for a while now. Sometimes, all we have left is prayer. So the women pray for fundamentalism—strict adherence to the Sunna. And the Sunna says: “Let there first be a messenger between you.” Words and kisses first, O bring back the words and kisses.

From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine, Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float, Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine, These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken and threaten with throbs through the throat? Thicken and thrill as a theatre thronged at appeal of an actor's appalled agitation, Fainter with fear of the fires of the future than pale with the promise of pride in the past; Flushed with the famishing fullness of fever that reddens with radiance of rathe recreation, Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that gleam through the gloom of the gloaming when ghosts go aghast? Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of terror, Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death: Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error, Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath. Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses Sweetens the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh; Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses— "Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die." Mild is the mirk and monotonous music of memory, melodiously mute as it may be, While the hope in the heart of a hero is bruised by the breach of men's rapiers, resigned to the rod; Made meek as a mother whose bosom-beats bound with the bliss-bringing bulk of a balm-breathing baby, As they grope through the grave-yard of creeds, under skies growing green at a groan for the grimness of God. Blank is the book of his bounty beholden of old, and its binding is blacker than bluer: Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are the wine of the bloodshed of things; Till the darkling desire of delight shall be free as a fawn that is freed from the fangs that pursue her, Till the heart-beats of hell shall be hushed by a hymn from the hunt that has harried the kennel of kings.

Driving to the new dentist’s office the slow drive of a new place with the McDonalds that I don’t go to on the left, the mall two miles away. The Courthouse and the Old Courthouse road signs that break apart, the fork in the road that looks nothing like a fork or a spoon, in fact at best, maybe a knife bent in a dishwasher that leans to one side. And I know the dentist will ask about my last visit and want to know in months that I can’t say some time ago and I know he will ask me about flossing and saying when I’m in the mood won’t be the appropriate answer. He will call out my cavities as if they were names in a class. I brush my teeth before going in. It’s like cleaning before the cleaning person but I don’t want him to know I keep an untidy mouth. That I am the type of person who shoves things in the closet before guests arrive.

—after Frank O’Hara You have been smiling across the table at your date with a sesame seed stuck in your teeth. You will gain sophistication, become accepted by Reader’s Digest, and retire in Puyallup. In your next life you will be a teacher and no one will ever call you by your first name. After your next vacation you will come home and discover that your neighbors have redecorated in the style of Iowa trailer court. If you feel like you’re getting old, secretly plant zucchini in your neighbor’s flowerbeds. Avoid people who iron their sheets or roll their socks & underwear. Painting and poetry and music will show us where we should be going, not the senate or tv news. The next thermos bottle you see will actually be a listening device made in Korea. All the people in this restaurant are glad that they are not you.

The wooden horses are tired of their courses and plead from head to hoof to be fed to a stove— In leaping lunging flames they’d rise again, flared manes snapping like chains behind them. The smoke would not blind them as do these children’s hands: beyond our cruel commands the fire will free them then as once the artisan when out of the tree they were nagged to this neigh.

What is flat and nothing but skin, What lolls in a shallow world, What is watched for its surface, Between long episodes of water the color of a dead screen’s 
sea-green glass, What has but a few hairs in the snapshot? A bit of muzzle, No more than a pug’s worth for a rented red kayak, For this sailor swallowed by enormous wax lips, What is gray and aporial, Once mistaken for half girl, Half monster, Disappointingly naked and slipping under the hull. —Lido Beach, Fla., November 2013

It never looks warm or properly daytime in black-and-white photographs the sheer cliff- face of the ship still enveloped in its scaffolding backside against the launching cradle ladies lining the quay in their layered drapery touching their gloves to their lips and just as They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships rises from choirboys’ mouths in wisps and snatches and evil skitters off and looks askance for now a switch is flicked at a distance and the moment swollen with catgut- about-to-snap with ice picks hawks’ wings pine needles eggshells bursts and it starts grandstand of iron palace of rivets starts moving starts slippery-sliding down slow as a snail at first in its viscous passage taking on slither and speed gathering in the Atlas-capable weight of its own momentum tonnage of grease beneath to get it waterborne tallow soft soap train oil a rendered whale this last the only millihelen her beauty slathered all over the slipway faster than a boy with a ticket in his pocket might run alongside it the bright sheet of the Lough advancing faster than a tram heavy chains and anchors kicking in lest it outdoes itself straining up to a riot of squeals and sparks lest it capsizes before its beginning lest it drenches the aldermen and the ship sits back in the sea as though it were ordinary and wobbles ever so slightly and then it and the sun-splashed tilted hills the railings the pin-striped awning in fact everything regains its equilibrium.