Published with permission of "Light," Autumn, 1999
#HumorousQuatrain
Believing garbage cans are scandal… When battered, making us seem decl… My wife delivered firm commands, a… I threw away a garbage can today. And then a thrilling thought occur…
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…
. . . and after they had torn and… The earth, and passed the tons of… Through frightening fires until it… And then unloaded it upon the shor… Of Black Detroit, where it was fi…
Guidebook for Immigrants Part I. Making Your Vocabulary… “On sale!” “Reduced!” and “Absolu… Are usually milder forms of larcen… “Adult” means “dirty films” and g…
,The Honky-Poet Blues (With apologies to Bessie Smith) I’m sittin’ at my keyboard almos’… I say, I’m sittin’ at my keyboard… The wife want rent money,
Suggest an early death deserves our envy, *Hardy wrote a book of short stories called “Life’s Little Ironies.” **Hardy was often cr...
Argument from Design God’s antelopes have eyes placed f… And horizontal pupils, features th… Employ to see wide spans and speed… From lurking predators they’ve eas…
The Pathetic Fallacy Revisited I’ve seen near shore a sycophantic… A cautious waiter at an osprey’s f… I’ve seen his cohorts find the bea… Their interest in the dumpsters mu…
M. The Old Widower’s Effluvium His cachet evolves from subtleties… as he is groomed for an ever small… He doesn’t sweat for he cannot toi… so baths now seem superfluous,
I Defy the Cosmos This cosmic clutter wins no beauty… As ob-jet d’art it’s mostly gaudy… Like those on Christmas trees, ex… And kitchy rings at which the tast…
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… He sold another chit for their ret…
Graal Braun sooner or later plans to join the Lord or an acceptable facsimile on such and such a date. As a high school teacher he held a great variety of part-time jobs, most of wh...
My friend, your tender ego giant-s… Makes you condemn the past and yet… Find caveman lust your love now ca… Antiquely unaware how you’ll debas… Your brain is raisin-like with wri…
The trunkless legs* ignored detritus the colossal mass of time space and motion rolling on the trunk the face engorged millennia ago and a second ago the amorphous...
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…