Published with permission of "Light," Autumn, 1999
#HumorousQuatrain
The score now even after Jordan’s… up yours, you punk, confess before… she’d deceived you, Lance, her pre… see the Bible, frayunds, Isaiah f… four-car wreck on Hempstead, now t…
A Funeral Cortege Verse now slain by latest dogma, down the cobbled street come mourn… trundling Verse’s coffin forward, charging all to note the corpus,
Levels of Innuendo The cosmos may contain a constella… That holds a jealous planet, one t… To hurt some stars with black insi… And smudge with covert smears thei…
Academic Editors I hate the callow ones who think t… And have therefore the right to cr… I hate the ones who charge me twen… So I can try to win a ten-buck pr…
Electrocutions show our love of ri… We give the favored one a kingly f… As well as pen and ink so he can w… The thoughts we all will prize whe… We see his every need is now addre…
The Star See that star that now appears To glisten in the sky? It took perhaps a million years For it to reach your eye.
Midwest Opera The local mogul, tall, horse-jawed… machine-tool king, accompanied by his grim chic wife, strolls down the aisle,
What discount art inspired this ta… Eleven months a year you’re quite… Too dark and gaunt, we thought, to… By breaking out in garments so biz… But just when nature tries to be a…
Freedom* Now, the fathers, having suffered… gave unto their begotten plowshare… seeds that their begotten might also pro…
Savage Customs Dakota Indians placed a seed insi… The mouths of those they buried, a… A small but sturdy seedling gratif… The tribe, new life ascending from…
The Inmate (a sestina) My parents, souls revering freedom… took turns at serving as my jailer to show me how constraints are rig…
He could not paint a world that g… For his shimmered softly. His cliffs, cathedrals, seas appe… congenial things of liquid light; and even locomotives seem
Intellectual Insecurity When I must read reports I really don’t feel too slick If I can’t see what’s wrong When I encounter a [sic].
To men an infant’s mostly irritati… But his libido often seems impress… By females features favoring procr… The pelvis flared, the heavy sway… And thus, some women, knowing what…
The Anguish of Action We frame and then pursue specific… But find results are not what we h… Christ advocated love to all his l… Who then loved some —turned tigers…