Published with permission of "Light," Autumn, 1999
#HumorousQuatrain
In wines my wife prefers the red, While I like white the best. And so we drink rosé instead, Which both of us detest.
Above the stores medieval grimness… stones coffin-sized in high gray w… exuding dampness of tombs, lichene… towering inward, threatening Gothi… across the twisting cart-wide lane…
The corpse returned from war in parts, so six soldiers now appeared, jaws like fronts of trucks, determined to portray their faith in things they thought they ought to think were just. ...
Poets are, to most, myopic geeks, Effeminates with scarves and inch-… writing schmaltz with feathered qu… There are, it’s true, purveyors of… of teddy bears and valentines,
I hate Shaw with his absurd postu… who want to get in his pants to ca… I hate Henry James for writing se… it takes a cryptologist to figure… I hate Hemingway for his drunken…
Our voices hushed, we slip into the narrow, gloomy room, a taper on the back-wall bar the only source of light. Lou leads us to the wooden chairs,
Relativity at the foundry Behold the scene at the iron works Where whirls of girls and harried… Surround the boss, a man of vision… Who, visualizing a new division,
Aroused by thee, I misbehave, afire with lust while thou art coo… and thou then seem a microwave and I a zap-ped molecule.
Times there are in dreams and days when I behold with hollow eyes a happy horde
Schadenfreude (Misfortune Joy) We English-speaking folk don’t ha… To match the German “Schadenfreud… Denotes your pleasant feeling havi… Your hated boss has fallen in a di…
A Sixtieth Anniversary: Oedipus… Attraction through the eye, the li… Portrays the blazing start of this… For years that magnetism did not w… Remained the stuff to move a sonne…
Ask Not Whom the Toll Bails A Grecian corpse’s mouth containe… Placed there by kin who thought he… To pay the toll required to cross… (A job that Charon got through po…
Ms. Dickinson’s TV Western for… A cone of force, perspective sharp… pricked with gleams from sabers si… moves out at dawn to cross the pla… and save the souls at the distant…
Verse now slain by latest dogma, down the cobbled street come mourn… trundling Verse’s coffin forward, charging all to note the corpus, garroted for disregarding
Coffee Table Books A coffee table book’s not there to… it’s there to stupefy your curious… who read the titles surreptitiousl… to sneer in secret at your shallow…