767 Humor poems

loop Down the road Up the hill Into the house Over the wall Under the bed After the fact By the way Out of the woods Behind the times In front of the door Between the lines Along the path echo In the way it was in the street it was in the back it was in the house it was in the room it was in the dark it was fat fate Be at That this Come as If when Stay or Soon then Ever happen It will look Particular pleasures weather measures or Dimestore delights faced with such sights. here Outstretched innocence Implacable distance Lend me a hand See if it reaches time Of right Of wrong Of up Of down Of who Of how Of when Of one Of then Of if Of in Of out Of feel Of friend Of it Of now moral Now the inevitable As in tales of woe The inexorable toll It takes, it takes. eat Head on backwards Face front neck’s Pivot bunched flesh Drops jowled brunch. toffee Little bit patted pulled Stretched set let cool. case Whenas To for If where From in Past place Stated want Gain granted Planned or have a heart Have heart Find head Feel pattern Be wed Smell water See sand Oh boy Ain’t life grand oh oh Now and then Here and there Everywhere On and on winter Season’s upon us Weather alarms us Snow riot peace Leaves struck fist. duty Let little Linda allow litigation Foster faith’s fantasy famously And answer all apt allegations Handmake Harold’s homework handsomely gotcha Passion’s particulars Steamy hands Unwashed warmth One night stands west acton summer Cat’s rats, Mother’s brother Vacation’s patience, loud clouds Fields far, seize trees School’s rules, friends tend Lawn’s form, barn’s beams Hay’s daze, swallows follow Sun’s sunk, moon mends Echo’s ending, begin again far “Far be it from Harry to alter the sense of drama inherent in the almighty tuxedo ...” “Far be it from Harry” Sit next to Mary, See how the Other Follows your Mother pat’s Pat’s place Pattern’s face Aberrant fact Changes that four’s Four’s forms Back and forth Feel way Hindside Paper route Final chute sentences Indefatigably alert when hit still hurt. Whenever he significantly alters he falters. Wondrous weather murmured mother. Unforgettable twist in all such synthesis. Impeccably particular you always were. Laboriously enfeebled he still loved people. words Driving to the expected Place in mind in Place of mind in Driving to the expected here You have to reach Out more it’s Farther away from You it’s here data Exoneration’s face Echoed distaste Privileged repetition Makeshift’s decision— • Now and then Behind time’s Emptied scene and Memory’s mistakes— • You are here And there too Being but one Of you— scatter All that’s left of coherence. echo again Statement keep talking Train round bend over river into distance door Everything’s before you were here. summer ’38 Nubble’s Light a sort of bump I thought— a round insistent small place not like this— it was a bluff, tip on the edge of the sea. air Lift up so you’re Floating out Of your skin at The edge but Mostly up seeming Free of the ground. echoes Think of the Dance you could do One legged man Two legged woman. there Hard to be unaddressed— Empty to reflection— Take the road east— Be where it is. echoes Sunrise always first— That light—is it Round the earth—what Simple mindedness. star Where It is There You are • Out there In here Now it is Was also • Up where It will be And down Again • No one Point To it Ever

Do I have to dress up or can I wear jeans? Dear Joaquin, casual Sunday is a plus! Can a woman be fully present in heels? Remember the other day at the shops, we saw the T-shirt that read “Blessed” across the front? I know you picked it up for me as a joke, but it made me pause. I think I am blessed in the way I understand people to mean it: having good fortune. But this is where faith messes with my clean concept, because practicing Christians don’t believe blessings come out the clear blue sky. So here’s God again, all up in the Kool-Aid. I’m dating myself, but I mean that He gets in the way of spiritual minimalism. He is at once contained and uncontainable, which, intellectually, is hard to understand. So being blessed must require that one acts in such a way that presses God to bestow blessings, which isn’t the same thing as good fortune, but I want to believe that people are saying, “You have such good fortune, I hope for good fortune, too,” because it means that no one is preaching at me like, “You have good God-God,” “Father God I hope He Gods for us, too,” “You got God?” Et cetera.

I, the Lord, will make barren your fields and your fairways. Your refrigerators will be empty, no steaks and no leg bones, no butter and no cornbread. And I will remove your screen doors, force the mosquitoes indoors where you lie on the bed undead. For my house you have not readied, no flat screen and no broadband. My habitation is a wasteland of furniture from motel rooms. I will send the ostrich and badger in herds through your wrecked rooms; your beds will be entered by turnstile; the floor will seethe with bees. For my house is but a prefab; its roof lets in my rain. Woe is the Lord of Heaven who has no mansion on earth. Cries are heard from my fish traps, crows flap on my hat rack, pandemonium at the threshold as the owls and bats flit in. Silence reigns in the last place and the first place has no sway. For my knife-edge is impatient, my ledge crumbles like cake. I have warned you to beware. You await a handsome savior, but the plain man draws near... (Zephaniah)

Her e-mail inbox always overflows. Her outbox doesn’t get much use at all. She puts on hold the umpteen-billionth call As music oozes forth to placate those Who wait, then disconnect. Outside, wind blows, Scything pale leaves. She sees a sparrow fall Fluttering to a claw-catch on a wall. Will He be in today? God only knows. She hasn’t seen His face—He’s so aloof. She’s long resigned He’ll never know or love her But still can wish there were some call, some proof That He requires a greater service of her. Fingers of rain now drum upon the roof, Coming from somewhere, somewhere far above her.

Godolphin Horne was Nobly Born; He held the Human Race in Scorn, And lived with all his Sisters where His Father lived, in Berkeley Square. And oh! the Lad was Deathly Proud! He never shook your Hand or Bowed, But merely smirked and nodded thus: How perfectly ridiculous! Alas! That such Affected Tricks Should flourish in a Child of Six! (For such was Young Godolphin's age). Just then, the Court required a Page, Whereat the Lord High Chamberlain (The Kindest and the Best of Men), He went good-naturedly and took A Perfectly Enormous Book Called People Qualified to Be Attendant on His Majesty,

Goes out, comes back— the love life of a cat.

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so. Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue of any thrillingly dead thing. And you? Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk, thinking of what you never can bring back, or else you’re off in some fog concerning —tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work: to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving, my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark, a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here, entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

So there’s a cabbie in Cairo named Deif. So he found 5,000 bucks in the back seat. So meanwhile his daughter was very sick. So he needed the money for medicine bad. So never mind. So he looked for the fare and gave it back. So then the kid died. So they fired him for doing good deeds on company time. So the President heard it on the radio. So he gave him a locally built Fiat. So I read it in the papers. So you read it here. A poor man has less than weight, has negative gravity, his life a slow explosion. Barely he makes the days meet. Like doors they burst open. Money, job, daughter fly away from him. Irony, injustice, bits of horror come close, cohere. They are with us, the poor, like the inner life which is wantless too; our souls’ white globes float somehow in the blue, levitating and bobbing gently at middle height over the bubbling fleshpots. Our effort to remake the found world as the lost reverie is desire. So, little Yasmin was sick, sick to the point of dying. She was like a garden coughing and drying. And suddenly her salvation was there, a sheepskin, yes, a satchel of money meekly baaing from the rear. A miracle in the offing? That famous retired philanthropist named God was back in business? was starting to take a hand? directing things maybe from the back seat? Maybe. Restored to its rich owner (he tipped a fig and a fart, a raspberry of plump nil), lying safely on his lap, the money was mute again, was superfluity, and root and sum and symbol, both lettuce and lump, of all evil. She too approaching that state, Yasmin, a flower, meantime, dying. For the locally assembled daughter a locally assembled Fiat. Too wantless to imagine the money his? Spurned the miracle and thwarted the grace? So loved the law he gave it his only begotten daughter? Effed and offed his own kid? Saint and monster, poor man and fool, slowly exploding, Deif all this. Yes, one melts at his meekness, scoffs at the folly, trembles for his stupor of bliss of obedience, gasps at his pride, weeps for his wantlessness, grunts when irony that twists the mouth jabs the gut. Then horror—the dark miracle—roaring, leaps into the front seat, grabs the wheel and runs you down in the street —while you sit on a café terrace innocently reading the paper or, bent above a radio, feel the news waves break against your teeth. Deif in grief. Deif in mourning. Deif bereaved. Deif in the driver’s seat. Deif without a beef. And daily in four editions and every hour on the hour, the media heap your dish with images of sorrows and suffering, cruelty, maiming, death. (Our real griefs in their imaginary jargons.) And you cannot touch a single sufferer, comfort one victim, or stay any murderous hand. Consumer of woes, the news confirms you in guilt, your guilt becomes complicity, your complicity paralysis, paralysis your guilt; elsewhere always, your life becomes an alibi, your best innocence a shrug, your shrug an unacknowledged rage, your rage is for reality, nothing less. Yes, you feel, murder would be better than hanging around; if only your fist could penetrate the print, you too might enter the reality of news .... You switch the radio on, hungrily turn the page of sorrows and suffering, cruelty, maiming, death. Pasha, President, playboy swing masterfully above our heads—what style! what heroes!—fling themselves over the headlines into the empyrean beyond our lowly weather—ah, there all the news is blue and blank, those soarings, those mock descents are them writing their own tickets in heaven. Fortune, true, is spiteful and fickle, and glamour itself must stalk them—but cannot shoot so high as impotence dreams, as resentment wishes. Gorgeous, limber, and free, like our consciences, a law unto themselves, a darker law to us —in their suntans our shadow. And where they fly, the lines of force accompany, the patterns of deference continue to comfort, a maggotism distracting irony. Their rods flatten others, their staffs flatter them

A collector of   walks, I was practicing my llamastep when one of   those white geese with the knob of cheddar on its bill honked at the goslings ignoring the art of the rank and file so adored by Mussolini and other assorted lunatics who I have trouble believing could ever raise one leg parallel to the earth they scorched without falling prey to gravity that was given a special kind of dominion over the fascist paunch, a shabby thing I have never seen hang around the waist of a goose, though who can say for sure under all that heavenly down where the hips of a goose begin and end; and even if   tomorrow some budding scholar published a treatise titled The Mystery of Goose Hips to fanfare, it would be an exaggeration of   the grossest kind to equate a goose’s trumpet with the barking from the balcony by the sad bullies whose love of   the locked leg I will never understand since the knee was so obviously made to flex, which means locking one is most likely a kind of sin against Darwin or God, both of whom I think would disapprove of anything so unnatural as even twenty people moving in stiff unison to music unless the brass and strings were just about to sway and bend to the hot version of  “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

What makes you think I’m an eccentric, he said, in London To the rag of the reporters who had gathered to report On his eccentricities — the tin sink light enough for traveling, but Deep enough to swallow his exquisite hands in water filled with ice. A budgerigar accompanies, perched atop the fugue of Hindemith. You are trembling now like the librarian reading To herself out loud in her Arctic room Composed entirely of snow. A broadcast (high fidelity) bound by the quiet of the land and The Mennonite who told him We are in this world, but are not of this world, You see. From the notebook of  your partial list of symptoms, phobias: Fever, paranoia, polio (subclinical), ankle-foot phenomenon, The possibility of  bluish spots. Everything one does is fear Not being of this world or in this world enough. There is no world I know, without some word of   it.