767 Humor poems

Do you know what’s the unluckiest thing In the world, a differential grasshopper Said to me. I paused, I put down the Diesel grinder I’d been trying to fix, I turned off the stealth bomber, I faded Away from the faded away pedals, I put up Finely embroidered silk panels over the Faces of the statues, I pulled the green Vacillating amplifier into the hallway, I swiveled seven of the chains and Loosened the bolts in the balcony, I went Into the barn to unlace the cattle and Overturn the empty buckets, I put the White flag on the mailbox, I cut the Telephone wires, I fed the ducks better Than I usually feed them, I adjusted the Faucets so they’d drip a little, I waved At old Mr. Wiley with his smokeless pipe And his manpowered plough across the field, I moved a claypot off of a narrow ledge, I taped the key to the bulldozer to the Roof of the canopy, I took the cup of Auger bits away from the rabbit hutch, I put a padlock on the children’s playhouse, I picked up a stick by the sideyard gate, I broke it over my knee, I went to the well To fill a stone pitcher with cool water, I let the donkey & the goats go. I took A ladder to the hayloft and took down a Suitcase. I could see across the valley Down to the river from up there.

Baby ate a microchip, Then grabbed a bottle, took a sip. He swallowed it and made a beep, And now he’s thinking pretty deep. He’s downloading his ABCs And calculating 1-2-3s. He’s memorizing useless facts While doing Daddy’s income tax. He’s processing, and now he thrives On feeding his internal drives. He’s throwing fits, and now he fights With ruthless bits and toothless bytes. He must be feeling very smug. But hold on, Baby caught a bug. Attempting to reboot in haste, He accidentally got erased!

To wed, or not to wed; that is the question; Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The bills and house rent of a wedded fortune, Or to say “nit” when she proposes, And by declining cut her. To wed; to smoke No more; And have a wife at home to mend The holes in socks and shirts And underwear and so forth. ’Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To wed for life; To wed; perchance to fight; ay, there’s the rub; For in that married life what fights may come, When we have honeymooning ceased Must give us pause; there’s the respect That makes the joy of single life. For who would bear her mother’s scornful tongue, Canned goods for tea, the dying furnace fire; The pangs of sleepless nights when baby cries; The pain of barking shins upon a chair and Closing waists that button down the back, When he himself might all these troubles shirk With a bare refusal? Who would bundles bear, And grunt and sweat under a shopping load? Who would samples match; buy rats for hair, Cart cheese and crackers home to serve at night For lunch to feed your friends; play pedro After tea; sing rag time songs, amusing Friendly neighbors. Buy garden tools To lend unto the same. Stay home at nights In smoking coat and slippers and slink to bed At ten o’clock to save the light bills? Thus duty does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of matrimony Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of chores; And thus the gloss of marriage fades away, And loses its attraction.

I sit on the couch & witness my life projected on a screen — I am white w/a chiseled, dimpled chin & no lips. I’m a farmer who lives alone in a loft & not a lowly office worker who lives w/a roommate in an apartment where dust balls decorate the floors & walls & the ceiling rings w/children’s feet running back & forth like baby bulls. I am crazy enough to be a contestant on a show where I’m contractually obligated to propose to a woman who believes in a heteronormative, patriarchal idea of what a family should be. At the end of every episode, I offer roses to those I wish to make out w/more & take out on prepackaged romantic dates I could never afford on my bachelor budget. For example: a date in a castle, a glass slipper prop, a clock winding its way down to midnight. My date & I sip champagne, chat & eat, then we dance to a live orchestra led by a maestro who wishes he were dead. A giant screen appears & plays a clip of a live-action Cinderella movie w/Prince Charming played by an actor I’ve seen slaughter & behead a soldier like clipping the head off a rose. In real life, my dates consist of dinner at Burger King where we dine on chicken fries & don paper crowns for a royal feel. On another show date, I take two women into South Dakota where we fly over the heads of white slave owners carved into a sacred Native mountain. At the end of the date, I offer no roses to either woman & abandon them on a canopied bed in the middle of the Badlands & take off in a helicopter to provide the cameras an aerial view of wilderness & despair. At the end of the show, I find myself proposing to a fertility nurse in a barn made to look like a chapel & not the place where I raised my first horse, fucked my first goat. Here, I will milk the cows for our future offspring to drink straight from the teat like I did as a kid. The show ends & I rise from the couch & walk into the kitchen. On bended knee, I reach for a bottle of beer deep in the back of the fridge, pop the top like a question & take a swig, cold & crisp once it hits my full lips.

That was the year we drove into the commune in Cornwall. “Jesus Jim,” mam said, “back up quick they’re hippies.” Through the car window, tents, row after row, flaps open, long-haired men and women curled around each other like babies and the babies themselves wandered naked across the grass. I reached for the handle, ready, almost, to open the door, drop out and away from my sister’s aggressive thighs, Daddy’s slapping hands. Back home in the Dandelion Market I unlearnt the steps my mother taught, bought a headband, an afghan coat, a fringed skirt — leather skin. Barefoot on common grass I lay down with kin.

1 There’s a lot going on in “the” zombie apocalypse. But wouldn’t she recognize that her mother was a zombie? I mean zombies are a thing. 2 The last thing she did was point to one corner of the ceiling with a horrified stare. The nurse called this “a seizure.” As if words drained experience of content and continued to accumulate. As if words were sealed containers stored for safe keeping. 3 The background is everything that, for now, can be safely ignored

Midnight’s merely blue, but me, me, me, I’m through and through sloe, cracked soot- on-a-boot, nicotine spat, licorice whip. You can scratch, scratch, scratch but I stay underskin true to ebony, ink, crowberry, pitch; hoist me up by my hooves and shake till I’m shook, I’m still chock full of coke, fuliginous murk. O there’s swart in my soul, coal by the bag, cinders and slag, scoriac grit, so please come, comb through my fleece with hands pallid as snow and watch how they grow tarry, raven, stygian, ashed— or, if you wish, clean me with bleach I won’t flinch, just char down to a core of caliginous marrow, pure carbon, atramentous, utterly piceous, shadowed, and starless, each clumpity clump and eclipse of my heart raptly re-burnishing a woolgather dark.

A Kansan plays cards, calls Marshall a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap; that Kansan jackass scats, camps back at caballada ranch. Hangs kack, ax, and camp hat. Kansan’s nag mad and rants can’t bask, can’t bacchanal and garland a lass, can’t at last brag can crack Law’s balls, Kansan’s cantata rang at that ramada ranch, Mañana, Kansan snarls, I’ll have an armada and thwart Law’s brawn, slam Law a damn mass war path. Marshall’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track, calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk, Says: That dastard Kansan’s had and gnaws lamb fatback. At dawn, Marshall stalks that ranch, packs a gat and blasts Kansan’s ass and Kansan gasps, blasts back. A flag flaps at half-mast.

I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie, Whenever, wherever or whatsoever the manner of death he die — Whether he die in the light o’ day or under the peak-faced moon; In cabin or dance-hall, camp or dive, mucklucks or patent shoon; On velvet tundra or virgin peak, by glacier, drift or draw; In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom, by avalanche, fang or claw; By battle, murder or sudden wealth, by pestilence, hooch or lead — I swore on the Book I would follow and look till I found my tombless dead. For Bill was a dainty kind of cuss, and his mind was mighty sot On a dinky patch with flowers and grass in a civilized boneyard lot. And where he died or how he died, it didn’t matter a damn So long as he had a grave with frills and a tombstone “epigram.” So I promised him, and he paid the price in good cheechako coin (Which the same I blowed in that very night down in the Tenderloin). Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine: “Here lies poor Bill MacKie,” And I hung it up on my cabin wall and I waited for Bill to die. Years passed away, and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange, Of a long-deserted line of traps ’way back of the Bighorn range, Of a little hut by the great divide, and a white man stiff and still, Lying there by his lonesome self, and I figured it must be Bill. So I thought of the contract I’d made with him, and I took down from the shelf The swell black box with the silver plate he’d picked out for hisself; And I packed it full of grub and “hooch,” and I slung it on the sleigh; Then I harnessed up my team of dogs and was off at dawn of day. You know what it’s like in the Yukon wild when it’s sixty-nine below; When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow; When the pine-trees crack like little guns in the silence of the wood, And the icicles hang down like tusks under the parka hood; When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off, and the sky is weirdly lit, And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns like a red-hot spit; When the mercury is a frozen ball, and the frost-fiend stalks to kill — Well, it was just like that that day when I set out to look for Bill. Oh, the awful hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand, As I blundered blind with a trail to find through that blank and bitter land; Half dazed, half crazed in the winter wild, with its grim heartbreaking woes, And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows! North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and plain Passed like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again. River and plain and mighty peak — and who could stand unawed? As their summits blazed, he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God. North, aye, North, through a land accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes, And all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes, Till at last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill, And I burst in the door, and there on the floor, frozen to death, lay Bill. Ice, white ice, like a winding-sheet, sheathing each smoke-grimed wall; Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over all; Sparkling ice on the dead man’s chest, glittering ice in his hair, Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his glassy stare; Hard as a log and trussed like a frog, with his arms and legs outspread. I gazed at the coffin I’d brought for him, and I gazed at the gruesome dead, And at last I spoke: “Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes, A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies.” Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole, With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can’t control? Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin, And that seems to say: “You may try all day, but you’ll never jam me in”? I’m not a man of the quitting kind, but I never felt so blue As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I’d do. Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about, And I lit a roaring fire in the stove, and I started to thaw Bill out. Well, I thawed and thawed for thirteen days, but it didn’t seem no good; His arms and legs stuck out like pegs, as if they was made of wood. Till at last I said: “It ain’t no use — he’s froze too hard to thaw; He’s obstinate, and he won’t lie straight, so I guess I got to —saw.” So I sawed off poor Bill’s arms and legs, and I laid him snug and straight In the little coffin he picked hisself, with the dinky silver plate, And I came nigh near to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely down; Then I stowed him away in my Yukon sleigh, and I started back to town. So I buried him as the contract was in a narrow grave and deep, And there he’s waiting the Great Clean-up, when the Judgment sluice-heads sweep; And I smoke my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Midnight Sun, And sometimes I wonder if they was, the awful things I done. And as I sit and the parson talks, expounding of the Law, I often think of poor old Bill —and how hard he was to saw.

... and we remarked on how piranhas, in uncounted numbers, are capable of consuming an entire ampersand in such-and-such a time frame. The sun was up, and below, and was somewhere overhead. And I thought.... ... and we shared thick and hearty laughs, and continued into the very dense jungle. And thick. Preceding us on the trailsides were ruins overgrown, boots stuck in mud, and heads of sunken ampersands. Which made sense to us, for.... ... and the rainy seasons came, and went, and came. And day, and further day. And February was unusually warm, and this, in a zone renowned for unusually warm Februaries. We cooled our hands on ampersands, which warmed again when.... ... and you took my hand, and clasped it, tighter than I could stand it, tighter than mud clasping ampersands still. And so I fell, and you held me as I, unstanding, looked up at lianas in trees — the monkey skyways that    .... ... and the language we used with each other became thicker. We looked together at some ludicrous, large leaf — larger than us both, and thicker even than several large ampersands, together. We used thick language to describe it, then.... ... and we grew ravenous and set camp. And established a village. Built huts with cots, and plots of land for farms. We grew ampersands there and ate them, and when through with their husks, threw them into our yards, where.... ... and you took me, deeper into jungle, with the wild dogs and boars, and cackling beasts, and beasts that swung in silence. Dangling from the tufts, saliva strands from ampersands obscured us in the roughs. We toweled and traveled and tired and.... ... and the birds became aware of our presence, though we desired to blend in. We made tangible feathers from intangible thoughts, stuck beaks to our mouths using ampersand glue. We sat in our colors, without motion for days, until.... ... and you communed with insensible arrangements: changeable organizations; shapeless distractions; puffs of dimension; ampersands; the dead. I pulled you close and kissed you, but all I could taste was vortex, and sweet guava, and the distances to.... ... and we grew thicker together, for I too could perceive, in the dry expanses, forms of invisible logos made thick — the un-wet language of communicable waves. We washed ourselves in it, but our feet, touching ampersands, touched not the.... ... and you dipped your foot, from the riverbank into the river, where the piranhas began eating. And I sat, looking at my hands. Sat, for there was nothing I could say. On the riverbank, alone. There, with whatever remained. &....