767 Humor poems

Up late watching slug porn, you confess you had a boyfriend who could spin you like that, slug grace and slug ballet—we don’t touch the topic of slime—and those eyes dangling from tentacle tips must be a kind of love or lust, sighting farther and nearer all at once. (But are those eyes?) Slug sublimity suggests love’s a drag, touch that lingers and leaves a wet trail of memory and... What did we do before YouTube? Boob tube. Boobs we have none; slugs, of course, don’t care, can’t tell girl from boy, (being, you know, hermaphrodites), and only want flesh to fly. Forget their infamous languor—here’s litheness in loving, buoyant miracles of want, one slug spiraling on the axis of another like a globe slapped by an insolent hand. Neither old nor young, we’re familiar with sluggishness, too tired to explain why nothing makes us spin like that: a-swirl, a pirouette, a gyre! It’s either fucking or marriage, I say, saying more than I mean. Why can’t lust be love and love be lust? you’re always asking, even now as the slugs begin their sluggish withdrawal—each complete in love and lust; each mother and father to what they’ve made together; each alone, content, and free.

Heureux ceux qui ont la clim—Corse-Matin (6.8.94) Heureux ceux qui ont la clim Pendant la grande canicule. Heureux those whose culs are cool. Heureuse her and heureux him. C’est la canicule qui hurle, Ready to tear you limb from limb. Heureux ceux qui ont la clim, Cri-criant: ‘O turlútuturle!’ La situation est grim, The mise-en-scène a trifle burle. À chaleur disons donc: ‘Ta gueule!’ And keep ourselves amused and slim. Heureux qui par terre se roule: Lucky Luke and Lucky Jim, Edith Piaf, Tiger Tim, Et le plus divin Poupoule. Heureux Toccate, heureux Hymne, Heureux Mouvements Perpetuels, Heureuses Les Bîches immortelles, De tristesse sexuelle synonyme. Je ne regrette rien. I’m full Of love as are the seraphim, And plein de bonheur to the brim, Pendant cette grande canicule. La vie has satisfying sym: For every lui there lives an elle. Finding its level in her well, La source sauvage is in the swim. Ni ouragan ni canicule, Ni pretexte prompte ou assez flim, Can keep le coeur from feeling imm, Allègre in the planet’s pull. Let’s fly together in a bim, Au-dessus de la fou-foule Qui mange ses menus et ses moules, Impregné de sueur, et prim! For always I’ll have you, and you’ll Have me, and though desire grows dim, Heureux ceux qui ont la quim, Heureuses celles qui ont le tool. Forever through the sky will skim Le pé-pédalo de Dédale, Escaladant sans escale The blue horizon’s endless rim. En pénitence, le tournesol Beguiné, poudreuz, anonyme, Turns and turns, and at a whim Sonne, en sol, son son du sol. From Chatellerault to Arles and Nîmes Le visage bronze du tournesol S’incline comme un pa-parasol Trouve une épaule coquette, intime. Devisé dans le banderole: ‘Heureux ceux qui ont la clim.’ Across the fields the notes are dim: Son sol, son sol, son sol, son sol.

First, Beulah has no idea where the damn grape is. She just got her manicure and frankly could care less. She does find the cocky Cockney cute. But, so does that glittery Lil and well--- It’s Lil’s Big Show. Lil has blood on her hands, and rubs in the almond scented lotion, while she waits for that peeled grape. Beulah pours a large portion of gin and recalls the Minstrel shows, Bessie Smith, chicken dinners in a picnic basket, and a guy named Roy. He was no prince, but a king of the bedroom rambles. Elsewhere, boots are beating the ground, leaving bloodied feet and untended harvests as glass breaks across the faces of Polish Jews and the Spanish Republicans fight black clad insurgents. More boots, pretty, shiny, well-made boots. “until the war” says Tom in The Glass Menagerie. When America  sits  in a “dark room” and watches “until the war”.  Death’s stench rolls across the Atlantic, a powerful fog.  Meanwhile, The dapper heroes roam landscapes as fake as their stage names and the heroines roll up their stockings or sweat the chorus line But not Miss Lil and the disobedient Beulah, both swaying large hips and rolling brown eyes, generously Awaiting a man’s tongue sucking For Gertrude Howard (1892-1934)

On the back of an invoice I wrote my name in large Capitalist June Blue Letters And because money was involved And so was my name ever in jeopardy On the back of the same invoice I rewrote my name in large Capitalist June Blue Letters And in Leopardy and in Jeopardy I resolved, dissolved upon a radical eradicator Inking in, dissolving upon Jeopardizing in my own name in large Capitalist June Blue Letters

My favorite is the cream puff lie, the kind inflated with hot air, expanded to make an heroic-sized story. Another is the cannoli, a long lie, well-packed with nutty details, lightly wrapped in flakey truth. A macaroon isn't a little white lie, but it's covered with self-serving coconut. The apple tart carries slices of sour gossip, only slightly sweetened with truth. Then there's the napoleon, an Iago lie of pernicious intent, layer upon layer of dark deceit.

Fresh out of the icebox, this brain looks the wrong way from time to time, and misses the cat stepping by, Gerry on the screen laboring to tell the nuances his pink matter almost notices, he’s not my brother, not really my close friend, just my necessary neighbor on a bicycle going by like a whistle from the lips of someone I trust. He has a peculiar skeleton arranged his own way in the mind’s pasture. We were as they say “of an age” and so inter- twine somehow, though I wanted to work when he wanted to play. That long nose is in my life and in my writing and so is the Okanagan River. I sometimes get to the river when I am at work, the sun on my back not the ink in my pen. There was, when I was last in the Okanagan Valley, a cat with big paws in the neighborhood, I was told, fires I could see along the hillside, stunning heat from the sky, enough to thaw any brain.

A few of us—Hillary Clinton, Vlad Dracula, Oprah Winfrey, and Trotsky—peer through the kitchen window at a raccoon perched outside on a picnic table where it picks over chips, veggies, olives, and a chunk of pâte. Behind us others crowd the hallway, many more dance in the living room. Trotsky fusses with the bloody screwdriver puttied to her forehead. Hillary Clinton, whose voice is the rumble of a bowling ball, whose hands are hairy to the third knuckle, lifts his rubber chin to announce, “What a perfect mask it has!” While the Count whistling through his plastic fangs says, “Oh, and a nose like a chef.” Then one by one the other masks join in: “Tail of a gambler,” “a swashbuckler’s hips,” “feet of a cat burglar.” Trotsky scratches herself beneath her skirt and Hillary, whose lederhosen are so tight they form a codpiece, wraps his legs around Trotsky’s leg and humps like a dog. Dracula and Oprah, the married hosts, hold hands and then let go. Meanwhile the raccoon squats on the gherkins, extracts pimentos from olives, and sniffs abandoned cups of beer. A ghoul in the living room turns the music up and the house becomes a drum. The windows buzz. “Who do you love? Who do you love?” the singer sings. Our feathered arms, our stockinged legs. The intricate paws, the filleting tongue. We love what we are; we love what we’ve become.

Willie had a stubborn wart upon his middle toe. Regardless, though, of what he tried the wart refused to go. So Willie went and visited his family foot physician, who instantly agreed it was a stubborn wart condition. The doctor tried to squeeze the wart. He tried to twist and turn it. He tried to scrape and shave the wart. He tried to boil and burn it. He poked it with a pair of tongs. He pulled it with his tweezers. He held it under heat lamps, and he crammed it into freezers. Regrettably these treatments were of very little use. He looked at it and sputtered, “Ach! I cannot get it loose!” “I’ll have to get some bigger tools to help me to dissect it. I’ll need to pound and pummel it, bombard it and inject it.” He whacked it with a hammer, and he yanked it with a wrench. He seared it with a welding torch despite the nasty stench. He drilled it with a power drill. He wrestled it with pliers. He zapped it with a million volts from large electric wires. He blasted it with gamma rays, besieged it with corrosives, assaulted it with dynamite and nuclear explosives. He hit the wart with everything, but when the smoke had cleared, poor Willie’s stubborn wart remained, and Willie’d disappeared.

Big smelly bowel movements this blue January morning. From the living room TV, a commercial from our TV company:We’re the fastest, the only — Meaning,Love us above all others. What makes poop more pungent on certain days? A question for science. From the living room TV: the powerful cite Law, bark Order— Meaning,Love us or else. Years ago, a teacher said never to use the word “poop” in a poem. Today, the icy kiss of the toilet seat wakes me up. Today, I poop while my boyfriend shouts from the living room,Did you hear that, meaning the atomic scientists who say we are now two & a half minutes to midnight. But still I marvel whenever poop comes out as one true Platonic tube. I am trying to be marvelous. & to make my enemies throw up. I mean, if you shower with soap & eat well, maintaining consistent gastrointestinal health, you should be ready for a rimjob or other forms of anal play. My boyfriend & I are not platonic. From the TV: a white supremacist cites Science, barks Two sides to every — I mean, up the throat, out the mouth: the fastest, the only way the powerful will let go of their shit. I mean, my boyfriend & I are not into scat but if you are I hope your beloved produces the most fragrant, citrusy shit. I mean, is “shit” more or less literary than “poop”? I mean, one winter night I got sick & pooped the bed. & he just got up with me. Helped strip the sheets, carry it all to the washer. I kept saying,I’m so sorry, shivering,I’m so, I’m sorry. But he said,What? Hey. I love you.

One day there passed by a company of cats a wise dog. And as he came near and saw that they were very intent and heeded him not, he stopped. Then there arose in the midst of the company a large, grave cat and looked upon them and said, “Brethren, pray ye; and when ye have prayed again and yet again, nothing doubting, verily then it shall rain mice.” And when the dog heard this he laughed in his heart and turned from them saying, “O blind and foolish cats, has it not been written and have I not known and my fathers before me, that that which raineth for prayer and faith and supplication is not mice but bones.”