767 Humor poems

it’s rank it cranks you up crash you’re fracked you suck shucks you’re wack you be all you cracked up to be dead on arrival overdosed on whatever excess of hate and love I sleep alone if you were there then please come in tell me what’s good think up something psychic sidekick gimme a pigfoot show me my lifeline read me my rights

for Miguel It would be neat if with the New Year I could leave my loneliness behind with the old year. My leathery loneliness an old pair of work boots my dog vigorously head-shakes back and forth in its jaws, chews on for hours every day in my front yard— rain, sun, snow, or wind in bare feet, pondering my poem, I’d look out my window and see that dirty pair of boots in the yard. But my happiness depends so much on wearing those boots. At the end of my day while I’m in a chair listening to a Mexican corrido I stare at my boots appreciating: all the wrong roads we’ve taken, all the drug and whiskey houses we’ve visited, and as the Mexican singer wails his pain, I smile at my boots, understanding every note in his voice, and strangers, when they see my boots rocking back and forth on my feet keeping beat to the song, see how my boots are scuffed, tooth-marked, worn-soled. I keep wearing them because they fit so good and I need them, especially when I love so hard, where I go up those boulder strewn trails, where flowers crack rocks in their defiant love for the light.

Itsy bitsy spider Climbed up the waterspout; Down came the rain And washed the spider out; Out came the sun And dried up all the rain; And the itsy bitsy spider Climbed up the spout again.

Word of it comes whispered by a slippery thin section of the paper, where the models pantomime unruffled tête-à-têtes despite the absence of their blouses. Each year when my familiar latches on them so intently like a grand master plotting the white queen’s path, like a baby trying to suckle a whole roast beef, I ask: What, you salt block, are you dreaming about being clubbed by thunderheads?—but he will not say. Meanwhile Capricorn’s dark hours flabbed me, uneasy about surrendering to the expert fitter (even if the cupped hands were licensed and bonded)— I had August in mind, seeing the pygmy goats at the county fair. Now the sky is having its daily rain event and the trees are having their hibernal bark event, pretending they feel unruffled despite the absence of their leaves. And we forget how they looked all flouncy and green. Instead we regard fearfully the sway of their old trunks.

Polyester is raised up on column 4 then joined or depressed on joint 3 on Saturday Albert reduced wigmakers to minuscule wages with his merry song which is glued to aluminum arm 2 then slides into elevated leg post 1.

Bobby Hutcherson in Oakland The mallet strikes but something's off, and so he hits again, curling that lower lip, purses his brow, as if this sign, this minor woe, were speech the vibes might understand, so when he lifts bluish lids as if wakened to the desired tone that rings now, it seems, it sounds, under wraps, a water-ly quaver, through the club crowd's silence, as it floats above us like an aerosol trying to find a new way to escape, passes through the wall's mortared pores to reverb in the cool night air of an unpeopled sidewalk, droning toward tracks where a passing peopled train sucks up and winds his finally found, wowed tone around its wheels, held there by steel heat one hundred miles, until it reaches the sea, where wheels and whistle overreach surging surf the good vibration feels such desire for, and leaves its tedium of the round and round, lofting to a sea that comes and goes but finally simply goes, as one night, this night, the cool vibes' air (struck finally in the changed groove of sax and ecstatic kit) is free, finally free, to go where we won't hear from it again.

If  you’re crowish and you know it give a caw Caaaw If  you’re weighted and you bear it send a moo Moooo If  you’re owl and you dreamed it, give a hoo Hoooo If  you’re thirsty and you mean it breathe an ahhh Ahhhh You are putty in my hands said the wind to the stone said the dawn to the bloom said the dark to the moon.

The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset. I deny all connection with the ham flowers, the barge floating by loaded with lard, the white flagstones like platelets in the blood-red road. I’ll put the calves in coats so the ravens can’t gore them, bandage up the cut gate and when the wind rustles its muscles, I’ll gather the seeds and burn them. But then I see a horse lying on the side of the road and think You are sleeping, you are sleeping, I will make you be sleeping. But if I didn’t make the ham flowers, how can I make him get up? I made the ham flowers. Get up, dear animal. Here is your pasture flecked with pink, your oily river, your bleeding barn. Decide what to look at and how. If you lower your lashes, the blood looks like mud. If you stay, I will find you fresh hay.

I would consider re-heating the tweezers if I had the chance, because, as ducks say in Ghana, “broccoli reversal gets priority.” I would consider re-heating the tweezers if Tu Fu and Cleopatra had a son named Sel. I have the chance, because, as ducks ask, “who was generated in Old Ironsides, AK?” In Ghana, broccoli reversal gets priority and grows up to be a pie dish dismisser. Tu Fu and Cleopatra had a son named Sel who was generated in Old Ironsides, AK. He grew up to be a pie dish dismisser.

If I eat a diet of rain and nuts, walk to the P.O. in a loincloth, file for divorce from the world of matter, say not-it! to the sea oats,not-it! to the sky above the disheveled palms,not-it! to the white or green oyster boats and the men on the bridge with their fishing rods that resemble so many giant whiskers, if I repeat this is not it, this is not why I'm waiting here, will I fill the universe with all that is not-it and allow myself to grow very still in the center of this fishing town in winter? Will I look out past the cat sleeping in the windowsill and say not-it! garbage can, not-it! Long's Video Store, until I happen upon what is not not-it? Will I wake up and BEHOLD! the "actual," the "real," the "awe-thentic," the IS? Instead I walk down the Island Quicky, take a pound of bait shrimp in an ice-filled baggie, then walk to the beach to catch my dinner. Now waiting is the work I'm waiting for. Now the sand crane dive-bombs the surf of his own enlightenment because everything is bait and lust and hard-up for supper. I came out here to pare things down, wanted to be wind, simple as sand, to hear each note in the infinite orchestra of waves fizzling out beneath the rotting dock at five o'clock in the afternoon when the voice that I call I is a one-man boat slapping toward the shore of a waning illusion. Hello, waves of salty and epiphanic distance. Good day, bird who will eventually go blind from slamming headfirst into the water. What do you say fat flounder out there deep in your need, looking like sand speckled with shells, lying so still you're hardly there, lungs lifting with such small air, flesh both succulent and flakey when baked with white wine, lemon and salt, your eyes rolling toward their one want when the line jerks, and the reel clicks, and the rod bends, and you give up the ocean floor for a mouthful of land.