Category Archives: doggerel

All Quiet for the Queen (a prequel)

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(Being an account of the Peculiar Events leading up to the Monstrous and Notorious Tragedy of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds who were martyred by being baked into a pie; and of the Warning previously issued to all Fowl within the Royal Earshot, which these aforementioned Blackbirds roundly ignored, to their own Detriment and Ultimate Demise; written by one, Witness to the Aforesaid Events.)

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Go quietly, quietly! Quell every sound,
You geese in the air and you quails on the ground!

You ducks with your querulous ducklings in tow,
You may go as you like; only quietly go.

No quacking; no quarreling; quash every cry;
Not a chirp from you blackbirds who quarter the sky!
The queen is asleep:
If you cease not to peep
She’ll awake and demand you be baked in a pie!

 

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Soon gone

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Dear you:
I’m done
All through;
Soon gone.

And when
I’ve died
Pray then
Provide

My due:
Coins two
(One for
Each eye)
My fare
to buy.

 

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Puella Mea

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IDL TIFF file

she was a marble
she was a plate
a bowl of stars covered her
a moon danced for her and her alone
she was a womb
she was a grocery store
her children loved her
her children wrote graffiti on the walls of her house
she was whimsical
she took her time
the wind blew across her
the unrelieved desert sun drove her to despair
she took her lumps
she was excessive at times
she wasn’t going anywhere
she doesn’t care what you think about it

 

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The Poet’s Progress (from the Old English)

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Word-whip went under world-hearth
Worm-pullers gave turf-warnings
Traveled he the truck-river
Till body-boats grew blistered
Yeast-sweat he yearned for
Work-markers sore missed.

 

Free translation:

The poet went out on a sunny day.
Birds were singing.
He walked down the street
Until his feet were sore.
He wanted a beer,
But had no money.

Blame NaPoWriMo.net, whence I was urged to write “a kenning poem. Kennings were riddle-like metaphors used in the Norse sagas; basically, ways of calling something not by its actual name, but by a sort of off-kilter description.”

Image: Beer Cap, by Jim Titulaer,  published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.

The Art of Verse, a Progress

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devilWe didn’t talk funny once upon a time
The way the kids do now
We spoke in even meter, perfect rhyme,
Made sense to sentence bow.

We knew a careless word might be the bell
That rang a god awake –
To what end, none could ever quite foretell;
A chance, then, not to take.

But careless we grew
and after a time, unsure what to do
or say, how, or to who
And latterly the language is grown askew.

And now, look. The gods awoke, all right,
and drank and danced and sang.
The gods went out, stayed out all night
wouldn’t go back from whence they came.

They’re out carousing now no doubt.
Oh hell, oh where’ve they gone?

And what have we to say for ourselves
anymore? Nothing, and more
nothing, the Devil’s taken the words,

Oh what were we talking about again?
Oh when did we lose track?
It’s too late to take care,
We’ve gained something
and we can’t get it back.

 

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Blue, or, Not blue

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We were all pretty sure the sky was blue
Though no one would put it in writing
And take the risk of one day being proved wrong.

Was it so wrong not to tempt fate? So wrong
To wriggle off the hook, and not risk feeling blue
At later, maybe, having to waste time righting

A wrong easily avoidable by just not writing
Anything? It was all right, then, not to write, right? Wrong:
We had a chance to take a stand — a chance we blew:

To say, Blue; or, Not blue; be right, or wrong; and nothing riding on it.

 

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Beginner’s mind

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If there’s one thing
I’ve learned,

I wish to hell
Someone would tell me
What it is.

 

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No ideas but in things

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“No ideas but in things.”
William Carlos Williams

All righty then
so say I want an idea
you’re saying I need to
bust open a thing
and find an idea inside
maybe a bunch of them
twisting like worms

and then what?
What the hell
am I supposed to say
about all these busted things
and all these twisty ideas?

Because right now
the place is littered with things I’ve busted
that don’t work anymore
and won’t even stand up
and the ideas
have got into the floorboards
and the bag of sugar
and the mattress.

I tell you
if this is poetry
it’s nothing like what I was led to believe
back when they gave us
that wheelbarrow poem to read.

So tell me
sage of Paterson
tell me
old witch
old doctor
tell me what’s the big idea
mister thing?

 

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That pencil

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8423788446_35d3415eb0_z_d
that pencil

was decisive as an arrow once
but soon I noticed
it was always a little short of sharp

but maybe
but who can say
anyway I persevered

and every scratch of the way
there was that pencil
unsharp ever
barely shy of blunt at times

anyway I persevered

now look at it
all chewed up like an argument
nobody won

 

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The very rich are different

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Paul Allen Yacht + National Geographic headline

The very rich are different from you and me.
They have bigger eyes. And they like what they see.
The very rich are different, they have bigger feet,
They will kick your tin can clear across the street.
The very rich have bigger pockets. They have bigger hands.
The very rich have bigger wishes which are your commands.
The very rich use bigger. What they want, they taste.
They don’t believe in you the way they don’t believe in waste.
The very rich will buy the biggest tree to knock it down.
They’ll buy a bigger factory and say that it’s your town.
They have bigger faces. They have bigger belief.
They may sail their bigger yacht into a coral reef.
The very rich take bigger, what they always can’t replace,
They will leave a pile of dead coins in its place.

 

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