767 Humor poems

This isn't my dream-job. As a young sheet of steel and plastic I dreamt of being melted down into a dancer's pole in Vegas. I wanted a woman in a headdress glossy as a gossamer to wrap her lithe limbs around me. I wanted to be strewn in lights, smell her powdery perfume. Instead I'm a squat box crouched behind the counter, noticed only if someone robs me. I'm touched all day, but never caressed. Listen: somewhere gold tokens spew from slots. I want to drink space-alien-dyed martinis on black leather sectional couches. Watch tipsy women with acid- washed jeans and teased hair dreamily press their faces against slot machines while people treat currency carelessly as spit in the wind. I'm everywhere you look, ubiquitous and ignored. I'm the container of your dreams that tossed aside my own. I've kept my clean, sleek lines but you never say a thing. Feed me, feed me with the only love we know.

My mind is shuffling its deck tonight, slipping one card over another, letting them all fall together at the corners; the random hand of memory is dealing from the bottom of the pack. First: a bearded man emptying the dragon kiln, then a woman whistling, her face turned away as she opens the oven. Next: a big cat, six toes on each paw, climbing up the yardpole. Last: a pair of workhorses circling a tree until they grind themselves to dust. There is no one home in the world tonight. Everyone is out of range. The cradles are empty, the boughs broken down. Trees go helter-skelter and the wheel is creaking on its shaft. Hit me, I say to the dealer. Hit me again.

‘’Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.’ -Falstaff ‘The night cometh, when no man can work.’ What though the beauty I love and serve be cheap, Ought you to take me for a beast or fool? All things a man could wish are in her keep; For her I turn swashbuckler in love’s school. When folk drop in, I take my pot and stool And fall to drinking with no more ado. I fetch them bread, fruit, cheese, and water, too; I say all’s right so long as I’m well paid; ‘Look in again when your flesh troubles you, Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.’ But soon the devil’s among us flesh and fell, When penniless to bed comes Madge my whore; I loathe the very sight of her like hell. I snatch gown, girdle, surcoat, all she wore, And tell her, these shall stand against her score. She grips her hips with both hands, cursing God, Swearing by Jesus’ body, bones, and blood, That they shall not. Then I, no whit dismayed, Cross her cracked nose with some stray shiver of wood Inside this brothel where we drive our trade. When all’s made up she drops me a windy word, Bloat like a beetle puffed and poisonous: Grins, thumps my pate, and calls me dickey-bird, And cuffs me with a fist that’s ponderous. We sleep like logs, being drunken both of us; Then when we wake her womb begins to stir; To save her seed she gets me under her Wheezing and whining, flat as planks are laid: And thus she spoils me for a whoremonger Inside this brothel where we drive our trade. Blow, hail or freeze, I’ve bread here baked rent free! Whoring’s my trade, and my whore pleases me; Bad cat, bad rat; we’re just the same if weighed. We that love filth, filth follows us, you see; Honour flies from us, as from her we flee Inside this brothel where we drive our trade. I bequeath likewise to fat Madge This little song to learn and study; By god’s head she’s a sweet fat fadge, Devout and soft of flesh and ruddy; I love her with my soul and body, So doth she me, sweet dainty thing. If you fall in with such a lady, Read it, and give it her to sing.

My reading is extremely deep and wide; And as our modern education goes— Unique I think, and skilfully applied To Art and Industry and Autres Choses Through many years of scholarly repose. But there is one thing where I disappoint My numerous admirers (and my foes). Painting on Vellum is my weakest point.

There once was a bamboo ladder. It reached up to the sky. And the Japanese man Did tricks on the ladder And said what a good man am I.

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt! Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail. Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world. You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines, Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs, And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

A perfect veronica, invisible, scallops air before the bull, the bartender’s fluttering hands. Tipped with silken fruit tinseled gold, a dusty banderilla hangs above racked bottles, burnt-orange. Your lacquered fingers streak the cocktail napkin and the globe of cognac’s fragrant on the zinc bar. Fields of chamomile. Close your eyes and then the night turns to coal seamed with diamonds. Outside, a girl murmurs her tired price, in pesetas, to passing men. Irita, the barman calls when she wanders in to wash at the single coldwater tap. Just a fly-blown café on your functionary’s street of flats, bedrooms shuttered around their whispering, the shops that gleam by day with scaled cellophane piglets, mounded bins of fruit and olives. Irita rewinds her hair at the bar, a gilt rosette nestling its waves, tattered bullfight posters on the wall behind her and you think of Rita Hayworth tossing roses in Blood and Sand, the frayed banderilla. Such a lovely thing to torture an animal with, the corrida’s exacting choreography of life and death. Sometimes it’s soothing to evaporate in this smoke-patinaed air, abandoning your imposter’s life of embassy files breathing the military names and numbers, Torrejón’s precise cold barracks. Your face wavers, oddly calm in the mirror as the girl talks dancing and flamenco clubs to the barman, absinthe glass shining derangement in his hand. It’s the place in the night where you carve an uneasy confederacy from vapor and exhaustion, a trio—the alien, the clownish poseur, the girl with nothing to sell but herself and straitened, cataleptic dreams. She stretches, plays idly the slot machines spinning roses, babies and lemons, the brilliant suit of lights. The caramel glow of the barlamps haloes her hair, bitten lips. Another sip and the slots’ click is rosary beads wafting prayers up to a heaven of slink and spangle, quick bargains struck in alcoves, that old palm of chapped fingers slipping coins to the gas meter, of spreading stain across the counterpane. Around Bar Xanadu narrow streets fill with the violet steam of after-midnight, the pigeons’ soft venereal cooing that speak of want like this, that deep original loneliness. There are heartless places in every city you’ve lived. Cognac spreads its window of warmth and the drifting years return bordered with the crimes of night, with cramped rooms you’ve climbed to, dead as the money in your pockets. A “dimestore Mata Hari,” the bureau chief called you while he snipped a fresh cigar. On parched plains outside the city soldier boys drill before the fighter planes, glamorous with starlight, still floating half-asleep in some Iowa of vinyl booths and Formica, miles of hissing corn. But it’s closing hour and beneath your fingers the napkin snows its raddled lace across the bar and you must rise with them, rise to dust with the barman his green bottle, help him to don the sparkling jacket. Rise to strap the magic shoes to Irita’s feet and then you must walk with her these streets you’ll never leave, gritty with wind from Andalusia riffling your skirt in the scent of blood oranges and sweat.

For John Ashbery “Good Barber of the Pea!” I exhumed, high into the vag where the barber keeps his pea — “Good Sprout!” His mouth, his gray, hunted tongue, always in the distance — “No use denying we master the particular service we deny ourselves. In the shade of this pea (the sum of his shade and the gavel flexing above his head) I will become a milliner to cover what work I’ve done. Or else, I’ll begin anew at the infant chin, where nothing grows but chins! Outside, snails, vines, surpass me and must — gaining pews upon pews. But don’t think for a sec I don’t know the way out of here, that release is one hair — spiral stair — top of which cleavage evaporates”

for John Ashbery “Good Barber of the Pea!” I exhumed, high into the vag where the barber keeps his pea— “Good Sprout!” His mouth, his gray and hunted tongue always in the distance— "No use denying we master the particular service we deny ourselves. In the shade of this pea (the sum of his shade and the gavel flexing above his head) I will become a milliner to cover what work I’ve done. Or else, I’ll begin anew at the infant chin, where nothing grows but chins! Outside, snails, vines, surpass me and must—gaining pews upon pews. But don’t think for a sec I don’t know the way out of here, that release is one hair—spiral stair—top of which cleavage evaporates”

This year an ocean trip I took, and as I am a Scot And like to get my money’s worth I never missed a meal. In spite of Neptune’s nastiness I ate an awful lot, Yet felt as fit as if we sailed upon an even keel. But now that I am home again I’m stricken with disgust; How many pounds of fat I’ve gained I’d rather not divulge: Well, anyway, I mean to take this tummy down or bust, So here I’m suet-strafing in the Battle of the Bulge. No more will sausage, bacon, eggs provide my breakfast fare; On lobster I will never lunch, with mounds of mayonnaise. At tea I’ll Spartanly eschew the chocolate éclair; Roast duckling and pêche melba shall not consummate my days. No more nocturnal ice-box raids, midnight spaghetti feeds; On slabs of pâté de foie gras I vow I won’t indulge: Let bran and cottage cheese suffice my gastronomic needs, And lettuce be my ally in the Battle of the Bulge. To hell with you, ignoble paunch, abhorrent in my sight! I gaze at your rotundity, and savage is my frown. I’ll rub you and I’ll scrub you and I’ll drub you day and night, But by the gods of symmetry I swear I’ll get you down. Your smooth and smug convexity, by heck! I will subdue, And when you tucker in again with joy will I refulge; No longer of my toes will you obstruct my downward view ... With might and main I’ll fight to gain the Battle of the Bulge.