767 Humor poems

Let them sleep and dream the dream of lobsters; I am likewise at peace in my little cottage trying to become Mr. Five Willows. I figure a crabapple is useful to no one but itself, but my safety depends on having no place where death can enter and not acting on every rustling of the smallest branch. My abode is at the bank of a river, a river that comes out of the marsh where the river merchant’s wife has pined for her departed husband for the last 300 years. Beetles fight on a dung heap; that’s the essence of war. With axes and arrows, a superior force approaches my door; let them knock lightly, so as not to disturb the bird in the cage, which I am coaxing to sing, while the candle burns to illumine the midnight lore whose frayed texts drive me to the brink of insanity. Let them all sleep and dream that the God of War has brought them riches in the shape of gold nuggets only to find in the morning an empty store. You can be in my dreams if I can be in yours. In any case, let the Chinese mafia sleep tonight so I can be at peace and in the morning, open wide my door.

When I was little I cut off the heads of many lords. I can’t count on the energy that took to rise in me at will, but I’ve strengthened my ability to make a stand-firm surface. A steady gaze will drive conflicted information away, back to the abyss from whence it came, but I’ll be right here the morning after, wracked in a private shame too awful to admit and of no consequence at all. I work very hard not to let myself go. Any channel can tell. Due process appears in beauty and misgiving at once; an agility borne from creative malice, a benign insecurity. The plain truth: I forget the curtains are open sometimes and the hands wander. The room stares back from its things: They understand the end of the world, will not waste time feeling your pain, and every- thing tragic in between need not be known. I don’t want love or remorse to follow I want them in the way, things to burst through corollaries to be roped and tackled by surprise, get killed, and thank you. One fate transforms into another, but I won’t touch that bandaged story. I won’t belong to this scripted conversation, though I may play along. Identity theft accepting renewal orders, copycat pre-emptive attacks an obscure murder string on the public glide by sight, the victim a John doughnut pining for leadership from the passenger seat. The threat of meaning reassures: I know it’s being made for me. Am I supposed to believe we’re receiving information? Can I defect back to curiosity in the moonlight, stone rabbit? Hit on by Echo, I go cold for the love of my own exile, and while I hope, my flesh explodes into an arrangement of stars pestered by darkness. Those aren’t birds you hear, just their corresponding holes in the sky. All the bottled water isn’t fooling anyone.

For Hasna Henna and the Rohingya Lice? My aunt once drew a comb through my hair steady; she wouldn’t let what feeds on blood eat my inner tree. Where now is the word for such intimacy? I know it still, but all I see are jungles burnt of our rarest trees. My point is: it takes a while to say, “I am a fire hazard,” or, “a household of rare birds” is another way to say tree. I wrote one draft of this poem, then she died. Will I forget her name, Hasna Henna? Let’s smell a tree; night-blooming jasmine, o-so-heavenly! A sapling succeeds by flourishing from a tree’s seed. How else to perfume these needs we breathe? A sapling of course = a small and soft tree (i.e. baby tree). I grieve the rice she fed me off a palm leaf. Only now can I fully marvel: how finely formed is a tree! Someone I loved said to stop with the oceans in my poems — well, oceans + oceans + oceans! We drown so many trees. (Night blooming tree = baby tree = once and future tree.) Lately, all I think about are trees. Read this again to replace tree with refugee. Tarfia = joy in the margins + one who lies to protect trees.

Falling off a triangle. Putting two fighting fish in one bowl. Talking yourself into a headcold. Falling off a rectangle. Putting insects in ice cubes. Talking yourself out of doorways. Falling off a parallelogram. Talking into a microphone. Falling off a footstool. Putting earplugs in acorns. Looking into a teacup for trouble. Talking yourself out of breathing. Taking a nap on a drum set. Eating a peach with an air filter. Wearing a dress made of hand grenades. Talking a mudslide back up a mountain. Lighting a camp fire in a taxi stand. Launching a boat on a horse trail. Hiking in an elevator. Falling into an envelope. Discussing smuggling with customs officers. Taking a cat to a dog show. Falling in love with a toothache, Questioning your thumbprint. Looking for milk in a gas tank. Kissing hydraulic acid. Blindfolding a parking meter. Falling over a water tower. Reasoning with a baby.

When working on a small scale He is practicing a gesture. So much of life is practicing gestures. So much of living is evaluating Those around you for signs of damage. Now it is night, morning’s a blink away. Sleep is sometimes thought of As an avalanche of repair gnomes That attends your pit stop. Would that we were sleeping now! Viable alternatives will be reviled Until the point of no return is passed. The only reasonable course of action Is to look for sizeable flotsam, Redo the resume, learn a martial art.

Why are the things that have no death The ones with neither sight nor breath! Eternity is thrust upon A bit of earth, a senseless stone. A grain of dust, a casual clod Receives the greatest gift of God. A pebble in the roadway lies— It never dies. The grass our fathers cut away Is growing on their graves today; The tiniest brooks that scarcely flow Eternally will come and go. There is no kind of death to kill The sands that lie so meek and still. . . . But Man is great and strong and wise— And so he dies.

1.  Is all at least partially as you might wish? 2. Was the flat even slightly in shape to be sent off? And O what gravity sits upon me here Indeed I am a fellow with something of the world upon my
 shoulders. I turn and say to you “Now I work. I earn to learn!” Masters of thought Gutkind The Arts Ozenfant Anthropology and Culture Stern World Literature Lenrow Conflicting World Capitals Kohn I am in a library for this week and then tickets to be taken. And so I might tell you more of this Like a crow with wings that will not come down A cock o’ the walk fluffing a pretty feather. There is a thing I can’t shake from my mind though. That Limbo you must have automatically slipped me to. I remember mentioning the fact of  it to a child In my convent days She neatly placed me with a slight half shiver In that gray-green unborn world I could taste the color — finger the dullfelt mute of a place. You said, “And indeed that explains it!” I, perhaps, see strings of nuns Like black pearls drawn slowly t’ards the step And well there may be a star at the top And there are the doleful moods of my mock-goblin godliness.

The silence of night hours is never really silent. You hear the air, even when it doesn’t stir. It’s a memory of the day. Nothing stirs. Memory lags. No traffic hushing up and down tricky hills among the camphor trees. No foghorns, no streetcars’ shrilling phantoms before they emerge from tunnels. These absences keep us alert. No rain or street voices, nobody calling to someone else, Hannah, you walk the dog tonight yet or what?

even if we won’t admit it. Getting off the subway at Canal St. — I wonder if the author is a man or a woman? A teen? A team?

Louisiana skies paddle north nodding hello to some exiles displaced by floodwaters so we all putter in the bisque in fretted dresses, alleviated by a fan. But we have nothing on "Le Matin," in whose rococo frame a curtain sweeps to bare a boudoir, a Bichon Frisé worrying something between paws, begging the dulcet glance of the mistress whose push-up, cupless corset and up-drawn stocking border what they fall short of, per the stern frame rippling like a cloud! Even the candle angles to get a look in the mirror engloving the scene. Why it is her slipper the bitch clutches! The gentleman's reverie is elsewhere . . . Loitering Louisiana stops to admire this engraving by "N. Lavreinee." What a chevalier! It makes the smeariest sunset think it's in a Restoration Comedy, in such humidity chefs defer meringues. "Ksar Rouge," "Taos Adobe," "Gulf Shrimp"—a thousand names of softboiled lipsticks fritter English as if it were French, meaning meeting no resistance from the flesh.