767 Humor poems

I was out walking, sweaty and with hair plastered to my face when I saw Ernesto Cardenal approaching from the opposite direction and by way of greeting I said: Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven that is communism, is there a place for homosexuals? Yes, he said. And for impenitent masturbators? For sex slaves? For sex fools? For sadomasochists, for whores, for those obsessed with enemas, for those who can't take it anymore, those who really truly can't take it anymore? And Cardenal said yes. And I raised my eyes and the clouds looked like the pale pink smiles of cats and the trees cross-stitched on the hill (the hill we've got to climb) shook their branches. Savage trees, as if saying some day, sooner rather than later, you'll have to come into my rubbery arms, into my scraggly arms, into my cold arms. A botanical frigidity that'll stand your hair on end.

Baby, give me just one more hiss We must lake it fast morever I want to cold you in my harms & never get lo I live you so much it perts! Baby, jive me gust one more bliss Whisper your neat nothings in my near Can we hock each other one tore mime? All light wrong? Baby give me just one more briss My won & homely You wake me meek in the needs Mill you larry me? Baby, hive me just one more guess With this sing I’ll thee shed

The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stroked by a razor.Chug say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam.Chug chug say the piston-powered ground squirrels. The tumbleweeds circle on retrofitted tracks, but the blue pasteboard welkin is much dented by little winds. The yuccas pulse softly under the grow-light sconces. Here is the door he will paint on the rock. Here is the glass floor of the cliff. He’ll enter from the west, backlit in orange isinglass, pyrite pendants glinting from the fringes of his voice.

The halotolerant crocodile idles in brackish water like a tow truck. Salt glands meter in its diapsid skull; smug fucker that the epochs couldn’t kill. How easy “kill” then closes onto “smile,” the lockjaw of a life that rides its luck, knowing from hindmost teeth to jackknifed tail Leviathan is neither fish nor mammal.

purged of accretions & newly published in the corrected hemimeter version prepared under the general folgership of G. Starbuck Poor Soul Fly, thief; thy fief- dom ’s torched. Come, Cur. Fetch! Get your scorched earth worth.

Have any of you, passers-by, Had an old tooth that was an unceasing discomfort? Or a pain in the side that never quite left you? Or a malignant growth that grew with time? So that even in profoundest slumber There was shadowy consciousness or the phantom of thought Of the tooth, the side, the growth? Even so thwarted love, or defeated ambition, Or a blunder in life which mixed your life Hopelessly to the end, Will like a tooth, or a pain in the side, Float through your dreams in the final sleep Till perfect freedom from the earth-sphere Comes to you as one who wakes Healed and glad in the morning!

But the truth is, I am Thursday on a Monday. I Am the walking calendar alive of mixed-up days and dim hours. I have A week inside of me, a week or a year, time out of order. I have contracted With the world to behave, to try, hard, to be Monday on a Monday. I Look like I am happiness, don’t you think? On Monday, to you I have The right laugh, and seem always to be even-keeled and at-eased.

Bartender, make it straight and make it two— One for the you in me and the me in you. Now let us put our heads together: one Is half enough for malice, sense, or fun. I know, Bartender, yes, I know when the Law Should wag its tail or rip with fang and claw. When Pilate washed his hands, that neat event Set for us judges a Caesarean precedent. What I shall tell you now, as man is man, You’ll find in neither Bible nor Koran. It happened after my return from France At the bar in Tony’s Lady of Romance. We boys drank pros and cons, sang Dixie; and then, The bar a Sahara, we pledged to meet again. But lo, on the bar there stood in naked scorn The Goddess Justice, like September Morn. Who blindfolds Justice on the courthouse roof While the lawyers weave the sleight-of-hand of proof? I listened, Bartender, with my heart and head, As the Goddess Justice unbandaged her eyes and said: “To make the world safe for Democracy, You lost a leg in Flanders fields—oui, oui? To gain the judge’s seat, you twined the noose That swung the Negro higher than a goose.” Bartender, who has dotted every i? Crossed every t? Put legs on every y? Therefore, I challenged her: “Lay on, Macduff, And damned be him who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” The boys guffawed, and Justice began to laugh Like a maniac on a broken phonograph. Bartender, make it straight and make it three— One for the Negro . . . one for you and me.

It was relatively painless except for being all she could see: a world made of dinner, very pleasant; a lunch at something called a table in the dining room; an endless night; a half-day; another lunch, this on Tuesday. Yesterday. Today. Pieces propped up with supports. The therapist tapped his cigar. He no longer accepted her general opposition to myth, marriage, Olympic Games, and the course of decades. He said it was as if she were engaged in an eternal war, either watching a movie or acting in one, depending on the situation and time of day. She sat in silence, the sky above a half-baked blue, a blank- face dying of awkwardness. The simple explanation boiled down to the too-easy explanation. He was smart and charming then; and later, much less so. Behind his head, pictures were crammed together with the top layer hung so high she had to crane her neck to see the details. He said to please pretend she was listening.

Given the existence of plagues of eels and bloodsuckers in Lake Léman, cursed by the Bishop of Lausanne and the learned doctors of Heidelberg, the homicidal bees condemned at the Council of Worms, the petition of the inhabitants of Beaune for a decree of excommunication against certain noxious insects called hurebers, a kind of locust or harvest fly — given, further, the trial of the weevils of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne lasting over eight months, with due attention to the protocol of cases brought against caterpillars, to the custom of writing letters of advice to rats, the writs of ejectment served on them, and the rhyming rats of Ireland; and, further, Egbert, Archbishop of Trier, having previously 
anathematized the swallows which disturbed the devotions of the faithful and sacrilegiously defiled his head and vestments with their droppings, and exulted in scandalous unchastity during his sermons; in spite of the 
vermifugal efficacy of St. Magnus’s crosier and accompanying papal execratories, all sorts of animals, a cock burned at the stake for the unnatural crime of laying an egg, an ox decapitated for its demerits, all manner of sweet and stenchy beasts, are observed to persist in their heretical obduracy, irrational and imperfect creatures, though notified, admonished and commanded to depart from the habitations of man, notices to this effect being posted on trees that all guilty parties may read; and whereas it has been urged that brute beasts that they are, the field mouse, locust, mole, ass, mule, mare, goat, snail, slug, weevil, turtledove, pig, cow and bull, are lacking immortal souls (that they might be damned), they lack not indwelling spirits, otherwise demons and imps of Satan, of which they are the visible form, so that it is the demon and not the beast that suffers in the beaten dog and squeals in the butchered pig; a vile and lowly specimen of which genus art thou, the accused, standing trotters against the dock before me now, that did willfully last Tuesday fortnight throw the swineherd’s son to the ground, mangling his ears and cheeks, for which crime having first been dressed in a velveteen waistcoat as is our custom and the executioner 
furnished with a fresh pair of gloves, you will be conveyed to the town square and there without benefit of clergy be hanged by the neck until dead and your body thereafter displayed for the improvement of your fellow filth-dwelling sinners. Do you have anything to say for yourself?