767 Humor poems

Sand Wars was first published in Flanders, but as Van Bellingen pointed out, “eggnog.”

Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

The curtains part: it is a summer’s day. There a cow on a grassy slope watches as a bull charges an old aeroplane in a meadow. The bull is punching holes with its horns in the aeroplane’s fabric... Suddenly the aeroplane’s engine ignites; the meadow is dark blue smoke... The aeroplane shifts round and faces the charging bull. As the bull comes in the propeller takes off the end of its muzzle. The bloody nostrils, a ring through them, are flung to the grass with a shattered blossom of teeth. The bull, blood oozing from the stump of its face, backs off, and charges again. This time the propeller catches the bull behind its lower jaw and flings the head into a tree. The headless bull backs off once more, and then charges down again. The propeller beating at the headless bull, cutting the body away in a great halo of blood, until only the back legs are standing. These run widely away through the meadow in figure eights and zigzags, until at last they find the aeroplane again. And as they come running down the propeller whacks them apart. The legs, one with the tail still attached to it, the other somehow retaining both rectum and testicles, scamper off in opposite directions. The aeroplane turns away; the engine stops. The shadows are suddenly seen in lengthened form. The watching cow begins to low ...

It may seem morbid of an embezzler to keep a memorandum, yet many of them do. It may be mere neatness. -Wallace Stevens, "Surety and Fidelity Claims" I've made a little sluice-gate in the flow of cash across the spreadsheet on my screen. Amid torrential chaos and foreseen disasters it maintains its small and slow on-off diversions, so my work can show the delicacy of difference between the beans I count and one uncounted bean, and where the latter might invisibly go. The hollowed shoe-tree, the hermetic jar are gadgetry I might revert to yet. There is the money of the thing, the far secure retirement years, the deep-hedged bet, but I love working where the unknowns are, and writing down what I need to forget.

If they, more petite than the mice whose flittings have pillaged their robes’ sparkled trim, stood tiptoe on the plumped felt tops of their thimble-sized footstools to scrutinize the worn fabric of this room’s blue distances, would they locate the source of lightning bolts in our faces’ wrinkled pleats and construe the stars’ dance from the tattered embroidery of our steps, or find in our seamless unravelling years the tissue of apocalypse?

Fire in the window! flashes in the pane! Fire on the roof-top! blazing weather-vane! Turn about, weather-vane! put the fire out! The sun’s going down, sir, I haven’t a doubt.

As you may have inferred, Ka Pow is not a spicy chicken dish Meanwhile, you are an accident waiting to repurpose yourself Who are you to mix up languages? This is not a smorgasbord You have to remember that you are a cylinder, a form of fodder Meanwhile, you are an accident waiting to repurpose yourself Why do you need an expensive phone? It won’t help you in the future You have to remember that you are a cylinder, a form of fodder Our company motto: other than you, no waste shall go to waste Why do you need an expensive phone? It won’t help you in the future Have you ever thought of joining the circus? You might find a home there Our company motto: other than you, no waste shall go to waste Choosing suitable punishments is an unavoidable necessity Have you ever thought of joining the circus? You might find a home there. If you are speaking about my place in the universe, that’s not right Choosing suitable punishments is an unavoidable necessity Hasn’t the sky repeatedly proven to be the most excellent manager If you are speaking about my place in the universe, that’s not right Memories are iridescent insects infiltrating your dreams Hasn’t the sky repeatedly proven to be the most excellent manager Little sphinxes, I have instructed you to the best of my ability Memories are iridescent insects infiltrating your dreams As you may have inferred, Ka Pow is not a spicy chicken dish Little sphinxes, I have instructed you to the best of my ability Who are you to mix up languages? This is not a smorgasbord

I have been one acquainted with the spatula, the slotted, scuffed, Teflon-coated spatula that lifts a solitary hamburger from pan to plate, acquainted with the vibrator known as the Pocket Rocket and the dildo that goes by Tex, and I have gone out, a drunken bitch, in order to ruin what love I was given, and also I have measured out my life in little pills—Zoloft, Restoril, Celexa, Xanax. I have. For I am a poet. And it is my job, my duty to know wherein lies the beauty of this degraded body, or maybe it's the degradation in the beautiful body, the ugly me groping back to my desk to piss on perfection, to lay my kiss of mortal confusion upon the mouth of infinite wisdom. My kiss says razors and pain, my kiss says America is charged with the madness of God. Sundays, too, the soldiers get up early, and put on their fatigues in the blue- black day. Black milk. Black gold. Texas tea. Into the valley of Halliburton rides the infantry— Why does one month have to be the cruelest, can't they all be equally cruel? I have seen the best gamers of your generation, joysticking their M1 tanks through the sewage-filled streets. Whose world this is I think I know.

Fifty-nine days to go. I can't find my purple beach towel. I can't even get to my closet without walking across a sea of dirty socks. Mom pokes her head into my doorway, says: “Time to clean your room, Sophie.” And I have to admit she's right. And it's not that cleaning my room is the worst thing to do. It's just that there are so many other better things to do, like— painting my toenails Strawberry Pink, eating a huge stack of Uncle Joe's pancakes, dreaming of riding the Ferris wheel, thinking up a story to tell around the campfire on Scary Story Night, painting shells, riding waves . . . all the fun, wonderful, sandy, sunny things we do at Summerhouse Time.

O hideous little bat, the size of snot, With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes, To populate the stinking cat you walk The promontory of the dead man’s nose, Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan-Phyfe The smoking mountains of my food And in a comic mood In mid-air take to bed a wife. Riding and riding with your filth of hair On gluey foot or wing, forever coy, Hot from the compost and green sweet decay, Sounding your buzzer like an urchin toy— You dot all whiteness with diminutive stool, In the tight belly of the dead Burrow with hungry head And inlay maggots like a jewel. At your approach the great horse stomps and paws Bringing the hurricane of his heavy tail; Shod in disease you dare to kiss my hand Which sweeps against you like an angry flail; Still you return, return, trusting your wing To draw you from the hunter’s reach That learns to kill to teach Disorder to the tinier thing. My peace is your disaster. For your death Children like spiders cup their pretty hands And wives resort to chemistry of war. In fens of sticky paper and quicksands You glue yourself to death. Where you are stuck You struggle hideously and beg, You amputate your leg Imbedded in the amber muck. But I, a man, must swat you with my hate, Slap you across the air and crush your flight, Must mangle with my shoe and smear your blood, Expose your little guts pasty and white, Knock your head sidewise like a drunkard’s hat, Pin your wings under like a crow’s, Tear off your flimsy clothes And beat you as one beats a rat. Then like Gargantua I stride among The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust, The broken bodies of the narrow dead That catch the throat with fingers of disgust. I sweep. One gyrates like a top and falls And stunned, stone blind, and deaf Buzzes its frightful F And dies between three cannibals.