767 Humor poems

The one sincere crocodile has gone dry eyed for years. Why bother crying crocodile tears.

Everyone was happier. But where did the sadness go? People wanted to know. They didn’t want it collecting in their elbows or knees then popping up later. The girl who thought of the ponies made a lot of money. Now a month’s supply of pills came in a hard blue case with a handle. You opened it & found the usual vial plus six tiny ponies of assorted shapes & sizes, softly breathing in the Styrofoam. Often they had to be pried out & would wobble a little when first put on the ground. In the beginning the children tried to play with them, but the sharp hooves nicked their fingers & the ponies refused to jump over pencil hurdles. The children stopped feeding them sugarwater & the ponies were left to break their legs on the gardens’ gravel paths or drown in the gutters. On the first day of the month, rats gathered on doorsteps & spat out only the bitter manes. Many a pony’s last sight was a bounding squirrel with its tail hovering over its head like a halo. Behind the movie theatre the hardier ponies gathered in packs amongst the cigarette butts, getting their hooves stuck in wads of gum. They lined the hills at funerals, huddled under folding chairs at weddings. It became a matter of pride if one of your ponies proved unusually sturdy. People would smile & say, “This would have been an awful month for me,” pointing to the glossy palomino trotting energetically around their ankles. Eventually, the ponies were no longer needed. People had learned to imagine their sadness trotting away. & when they wanted something more tangible, they could always go to the racetrack & study the larger horses’ faces. Gloom, #341, with those big black eyes, was almost sure to win.

We smuggle crates of Beaujolais through the squeaky pantry door. We steal cases of cigarettes, borrow the bulletproof Mercedes to race through the capital’s empty streets. It’s wonderful, the peace. No local can afford a car, except the police. The police stand beside their cars and wave. The police lack petrol for their cars. There’s a beer bottle shortage in the nation. There are no bars. Drunk driving is a hobby. Driving while high is an art. No one in the bad girls’ group is not in the back of the Mercedes, Vijay on Ashanti drum all the way to the beach. Money is worthless. Cigarettes are money. We are thirteen. We rent a hut roofed with palm fronds. We lie out on the sand with our bottles of French wine and our Hong Kong blondes and look up at the Atlantic Slave Coast midnight sky: shine all my diamonds shine ’cause they really diamonds.

To a sister of an enemy of the author's who disapproved of 'The Playboy' Lord, confound this surly sister, Blight her brow with blotch and blister, Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver, In her guts a galling give her. Let her live to earn her dinners In Mountjoy with seedy sinners: Lord, this judgment quickly bring, And I'm your servant, J. M. Synge.

I dated mostly police. I hated coastal solace. In navy posts I flourished. I inflate the cost of polish. I restrained my nest-egg worries. On planes I tested patience. I prayed for lusty follies. I betrayed my foster family. In ways I lost my malice. I craved a cloistered palace. I dared say the feast was ghoulish. I became a tourist: boorish. Unswayed by mystic knowledge, I raised a frosty chalice. I was upstaged and roasted: English. I obeyed a ghost who’s tall-ish. The play was close to flawless. I stayed and missed her no less. Then one day the fester wasn’t. I cried: the taste was more-ish.

Fathers are invariably great nuisances on the stage, and always have to give the hero or heroine a long explanation of what was done before the curtain rose, usually commencing with “It is now nineteen years, my dear child, since ...” etc., etc. —Charles Dickens There might be a planet. Before that, though, there would have been a gas that coalesced into a planet . . . as, before that, there were dots of flux and energy that hadn’t yet declared themselves in concert. There’s always “before”: there's more each minute, more each person, yes and every one of its smallest, irreducible subparticles—which I name the “beforeon”—is exerting force on us that’s surely time’s own version of gravity: its purpose is to tug, and to remind us. In the house of second marriages, it causes the man to do what he and the woman had promised they never would: one night while she’s asleep, he snoops her bureau for telltale relics of the mysterious Mr. Number One. And why, or even what he hopes to find, he couldn’t clearly say: a letter? photo? sex toy?—something, some objectified gossip, a fossil of bygone love. Essentially, we make of our own psyches a bureau and pay a shrink to snoop; as for the moment when our neural linkage first began to form, as for the flavor of the fluids in the womb. . . we’re all amnesiacs: and our earliest self, just like the universe’s earliest being, is a “phantom limb” with the faintest mnemonic of starbursts in an otherwise chill void. I have a friend D____ L____ (this poem is hers) who, orphaned as a newborn, is devoted to learning her origin as doggedly as any cosmologist tracks light to its source, although her search (when not pure Internet) is more a matter of tape-recording the beer-sour stories in sailor bars, of sifting ashy memories in nursing homes, one backwards inch of plotline at a time. And yet somebody else is waking up this morning with the need to be detached from any history, to stand here like a person in a play who enters onstage from a pool of perfect blankness. Then, of course, he can start over, minute-zero-of-year-zero, unbesmirched. We could have told him that he’d be this anguished—sneaking in her drawer, below those folded pastel lozenges of lingerie, uncovering the one thing that could ruin them. Now he wants only to float (who doesn't, sometimes?) in an anti-world: appealing, but illusory. We can’t unmoor ourselves from linearity, no more than any one of us can be a human being unconnected to a genome—and in fact, no more than Mama-All-of-Time-and-Space-Herself (I mean the cosmos) can unwrap her vasty body from its own twelve million years of Big Bang “background radiation” so it wafts—a tossed off, filmy scarf—far elsewhere. No; there isn’t any“elsewhere.” When we sleep or simply deepen into quietude enough, the voices come—the rhythmic, grave, ancestral murmur, a woman bearing a ritual clamshell bowl . . . a man with a done-deal sales contract . . . whispers, knuckle-rap, cleared throats. . . . Her great-grandfather, D____ L____ has uncovered, was a lector—a reader they used to relieve the tedium of the leaf rollers’ shifts in cigar manufactories. Shakespeare, Dickens, union tracts, love letters, family diaries . . . . He’s walking through the tobacco aroma; he’s setting his text on his easel; and the story—the only story we know, the story of Before—is recited.

My Daddy’s forehead is so big, we don’t need a dining room table. My Daddy’s forehead so big, his hat size is equator. So big, it’s a five-head. Tyra Banks burst into tears when she seen my Daddy’s forehead. My Daddy’s forehead got its own area code. My Daddy baseball cap got stretch marks. My Daddy pillowcase got craters. His eyebrows need GPS to find each other. My Daddy forehead lives in two time zones. Planets confuse my Daddy forehead for the sun. Couch cushions lose quarters in the wrinkles in my Daddy forehead. My Daddy so smart, he fall asleep with the movie on and wake up soon as the credits start to roll. My Daddy so smart, he perform surgery on his own ingrown toenail. Momma was not impressed, but my Daddy got brains. My Daddy know exactly how to drive me to my friend’s house without lookin at no map. My Daddy born here, he so smart, he know the highways like the wrinkles in his forehead. He know the free clinics like the gray hairs on his big ass head. My Daddy so smart, he wear a stethoscope and a white coat. My Daddy drive to work in a minivan only slightly bigger than his forehead, that’s just how my Daddy rolls. My Daddy got swag. My Daddy dance to “Single Ladies” in the hallway. My Daddy drink a small coffee cream and sugar. My Daddy drink a whole can of Red Bull. My Daddy eat a whole pack of sour Skittles and never had a cavity. My Daddy so smart, he got a pullout couch in his office. Got a mini fridge there too. Got a cell phone, and a pager, and a email address where I can leave him messages when he’s not at home. My Daddy’s not home. Momma saves a plate that turns cold. But when my Daddy does come home, he got a office in his bedroom too. Computer screen night light, Momma says she can’t sleep right, but my Daddy got work, my Daddy at work, at home, in the attic, with the TV on, in the dark, from the front yard, through the windows, you can see him working, glass flickering, my house got its own forehead, glinting, sweaty, in the evening, while my Daddy at work, at home, in his own area code, a whole other time zone.

Once upon a time I caught a little rhyme I set it on the floor but it ran right out the door I chased it on my bicycle but it melted to an icicle I scooped it up in my hat but it turned into a cat I caught it by the tail but it stretched into a whale I followed it in a boat but it changed into a goat When I fed it tin and paper it became a tall skyscraper Then it grew into a kite and flew far out of sight ...

An arty feline couple parodies bourgeois gender roles and literary values before the days of  YouTube.

The nicest child I ever knew Was Charles Augustus Fortescue. He never lost his cap, or tore His stockings or his pinafore: In eating Bread he made no Crumbs, He was extremely fond of sums, To which, however, he preferred The Parsing of a Latin Word— He sought, when it was within his power, For information twice an hour, And as for finding Mutton-Fat Unappatising, far from that! He often, at his Father’s Board, Would beg them, of his own accord, To give him, if they did not mind, The Greasiest Morsels they could find— His Later Years did not belie The Promise of his Infancy. In Public Life he always tried To take a judgement Broad and Wide; In Private, none was more than he Renowned for quiet courtesy. He rose at once in his Career, And long before his Fortieth Year Had wedded Fifi, Only Child Of Bunyan, First Lord Aberfylde. He thus became immensely Rich, And built the Splendid Mansion which Is called The Cedars, Muswell Hill, Where he resides in affluence still, To show what everybody might Become by SIMPLY DOING RIGHT.