Republished with permission of "Iambs and Trochees,"Vol. IV, No.2
#QuatrainHumorous
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…
Midwest Opera The local mogul, tall, horse-jawed… machine-tool king, accompanied by his grim chic wife, strolls down the aisle,
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.
I am 88. I need much equipment: I need my walker so I can shuffle about, a lift chair to stuff me in the wa…
The Old Floridian Non-Conformist The young prize individuality And choose to feature navels and t… But that, I think, becomes confor… When choices made are what a milli…
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,
Times there are in dreams and days when I behold with hollow eyes a happy horde
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
The Futility of Action Our lives are sprawled in a meanin… where aims benevolent or evil, sel… eventuate in tortured remnants of… where Christ’s counsel of love to…
His Hobby Our Mr. Hughes, retired, was exce… At working wood, and every Yule h… A creche —cut plywood forms to rep… The cast, especially Jesus, whom…
As one New Yorker said, the guy w… You in New York, your wallet as h… At least has goals, unlike the oth… Who kill and maim and have no aim… Much like irrational brutes, our…
The Pathetic Fallacy Mitigated (An exercise in near-rhyme) To liken buying blue-chip stocks To squirrels hoarding nuts is bosh… As wrong as claiming dogs can blus…
Give Me More Light Give me more light I’m getting desperate here, you kn… show me what you’ve got is Ann Landers still around?
Miniver Cheevy Rides Again or You’ve Got a Problem with That? I sew women’s gingham bonnets. I assemble covered wagons.
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...