767 Humor poems

Raise up your back like an insect on the face of the nation He took Miss Mousie on his knee, O say little mouse will you marry me? Getting hair cut this morning illegally I can’t afford it Fourteen fifteen I depend on you and roiling unlap this morn The mind refrigerated all night Now to clarify the broth skim off the oil & swallow it is your oil I must have it shorter so it grows longer in unison A glory and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed on with wonder and tears

Look heah! ’Splain to me de reason Why you said to Squire Lee, Der wuz twelve ole chicken thieves In dis heah town, includin’ me. Ef he tole you dat, my brudder, He said sump’n dat warn’t true; W’at I said wuz dis, dat der wuz Twelve,widout includin’ you. Oh! . . . !—

To Adam Z You asked me last summer: “What is a doily?” Sometimes, at lunch, I walk on the beach. Today I was coatless. A storm cloud threatened, Dark as a spaceship. Should it pour, A sister ship down in the water Would throw up grappling nets to the surface, Rain rise to soak me. Behind a sandbank, Waves touched the shore, no more than a shimmer. Less rare than its cousin, the antimacassar, A doily’s placed between sweet thing and china. Both survive where vicars arrive For tea, are given thin cup and saucer Instead of a mug. If your cake’s so rich That it’s leaking syrup, you’ll need a doily. Held up, its paper’s the filigree Of snowflake, or fingers looked through in fear. The shower holds off. My shoe’s a doily. Without it, where would I be on these shells That crunch underfoot, like contact lenses, As I gingerly walk, on my mermaid way Back to my husband in his human dwelling? Someone is pulling a blue toy trawler Along the horizon to port, so smoothly It looks realistic. Sea’s partly doily. Surfers ride its lace to their downfall, After all, we’re nothing but froth. Like a carpet salesman, the indolent tide Flops a wave over, showing samples: “Madam, This one is durable, has a fringe.” Under Its breath the sea sighs, “Has it come To this? Must everything always end in ... doily?” It must. Broad afternoon. The rain-cloud barges Have passed and here’s a cumulonimbus parade Of imperial busts, the Roman rulers In historical order which, I think, would please you. Their vapor curls and noble foreheads Are lit up in lilac because they’re invading The west. Next come the philosophers and, last of all, The poets. Pulleys draw them delicately on. Here comes Lucretius, then Ovid, then Horace In lines, saying relentlessly, “Doily,” “Doily,” Till stars take over and do the same.

I don’t know how fast I was going but, even so, that’s still an intriguing question, officer, and deserves a thoughtful response. With the radio unfurling Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, you might consider anything under 80 sacrilege. Particularly on a parkway as lovely as the one you’re fortunate enough to patrol—and patrol so diligently. A loveliness that, if observed at an appropriate rate of speed, affords the kind of pleasure which is in itself a reminder of how civilization depends on an assurance of order and measure, and the devotion of someone like yourself to help maintain it. Yes, man the measurer! The incorrigible measurer. And admirably precise measurements they are—Not, of course, as an end in themselves but, lest we forget, as a means to propel us into the immeasurable, where it would be anybody’s guess how fast the west wind was blowing when it strummed a rainbow and gave birth to Eros. Never forget that a parkway is a work of art, and the faster one goes the greater the tribute to its power of inspiration, a lyrical propulsion that approaches the spiritual and tempts—demands the more intrepid of us to take it from there. That sense of the illimitable, when we feel we are more the glory than the jest or riddle of the world —that’s what kicked in, albeit briefly, as I approached the Croton Reservoir Bridge. And on a night like this, starlight reignited above a snowfall’s last flurry,  cockeyed headlights scanning the girders overhead, eggshell snowcrust flying off the hood, hatching me on the wing like a song breaking through prose, the kind I usually sing through my nose: So much to love, A bit less to scorn. What have I done? To what end was I born?

Exuberance sips bootleg gin from a garter flask with a ruby monogram “E.” She wears a red dress one size too small, eyes wide, she flirts with everyone, dares Lincoln Beachey to fly until he runs out of gas, rides a dead engine all the way down. She watches Ormer Locklear climb out of the cockpit two hundred feet up, tap dance on his upper wing as the houses of  honest families with their square-fenced yards slide below his shuffle. An oval pond winks in the sun, like a zero. Exuberance challenges pilots to master the Falling Leaf, perfect the Tailspin, ignore the Graveyard Spiral, the Doom Loop. These aviators predict every American will fly. Exuberance believes Everybody Ought to Be Rich

A little village in Texas has lost its idiot. -Caption on a protest sign Let us deal justly. -Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, from Shakespeare's King Lear; act 3, scene 6 But where, oh where is the holy idiot, truth teller and soothsayer, familiar of spirits, rat eater, unhouseled wanderer whose garble and babble fill rich and poor, homeless and housed, with awe and fear? Is he hiding in the pit of the walkie-talkie, its grid of holes insatiably hungry, almost like a baby, sucking in the police sergeant's quiet voice as he calls in reinforcements? Oh holy idiot, is that you sniffing the wind for the warm turd smell on the mounted policemen backing their horses' quivering, skittish haunches into the demonstrators' faces? Oh little village among the villages, the wild man, the holy Bedlamite is gone, and nobody, now, knows where to find him... Lying in mud? lying caked in mud, hair elfed into knots? Some poor mad Tom roving the heath for a warm soft place to lie his body down, his speech obsessed with oaths, demons, his tongue calling forth the Foul Fiend, Flibbertigibbet as the horses back slowly, slowly into the crowd and he eats filth, he crams his ravenous mouth with filth— and then he sits on his stool in the trampled hay and deep-rutted mud, he anoints himself with ashes and clay, he puts on his crown of fumiter weed and holds his scepter of a smouldering poker and calls the court to order.

Purveyor of  rot and whatnot, entrepreneur of  I forgot, with wrists hard as hammers — that birthmark a slot — grip it, strip it, flip it hard — ramp my shard. If  fear be sexy, a synch & a match — Gone the way of  wax & worms — gone like November 2011 — sweet by nature, mean by culture — “Goodbye, luck, you idiot,” said the Fox to the Grapes. “I love you,” replied the Grapes.

In Aesop’s tales an honest wretch we find, Whose years and comforts equally declined; He in two wives had two domestic ills, For different age they had, and different wills; One plucked his black hairs out, and one his gray, The man for quietness did both obey, Till all his parish saw his head quite bare, And thought he wanted brains as well as hair. The Moral The parties, henpecked William, are thy wives, The hairs they pluck are thy prerogatives; Tories thy person hate, the Whigs thy power, Though much thou yieldest, still they tug for more, Till this poor man and thou alike are shown, He without hair, and thou without a crown.

Weasel and the Ponce were having a confab under the chinaberry tree, in the shade of the dusty old tree— pious Weasel, indefatigable Ponce. Abroad in the land were pickings to be had, marks beyond measure, fat aplenty for tooth and hand. Will and cunning are the clean, bright edges of a creature in the wild, of a vigorous man, so that goodness finds sustenance, charity nurture, in quietude, in quietude within. The nose will relate to you a world, a world entire, from the merest trace of wind— the topography of weakness, gold in a river’s sand. And there they sniffed, sniffed and with hooded eye conspired, in the shadows thrown by the dusty old tree. Trading knowledge, whetting tools, they made ready for their necessary enterprise, the fate nature bestowed. All the while drinking in each other’s aspect: they found uncommon pleasure there, did Weasel and his friend, in the other’s smile and guise, as a young girl in flattering light, as a darling young girl by her reflection might— the two of them, lovely beyond compare in the shade of the chinaberry tree. Groomed, laved with blandishment, almost gilded in the hours afternoon turns to evening and evening, stealthily, to night, how would they have noticed the rustle in the thicket, felt the heat of its burning eyes?

Here is the grackle, people. Here is the fox, folks. The grackle sits in the bracken. The fox hopes. Here are the fronds, friends, that cover the fox. The fronds get in a frenzy. The grackle looks. Here are the ticks, tykes, that live in the leaves, loves. The fox is confounded, and God is above.