Republished with permission of "The Wall Street Journal," July 16, 1993
#HumorousQuatrain
Sports News from Mudville (Thanks to “Casey at the Bat”) The outlook’s great for all you fo… Linebacker Doakes was just picked… Then football’s finest running bac…
The Minister Speaks: “Our chastened knees and pressed p… Father and Son, you said, were co… the water to wine, the stinking co… mere legerdemain, you claimed,
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].
. . . And after they had torn and… The earth, and passed the tons of… Through frightening fires, until i… and then unloaded it upon the shor… Of Black Detroit, where it was fi…
Give Me No Perfect Things (se… Give me no perfect things: a snowflake - kalaidoscopic, machine-cut, different but all alike,
Don’t shock me with your atheistic… God gave us all a book that proves… And serves us as a guide for all w… excepting parts that don’t make se… God serves us like a good psycholo…
At breakfast my microwave appears to heat, electrons clearly humming; container, though, remaining cold, oatmeal cooling rapidly.
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…
System Restore (free verse with incidental rhyme,… Last week, not thinking, I punched a strange computer key and spawned unceasing lunatic para…
Domesticity The jelly cleaned off the worn lin… the laundry folded and put away, three children washed and bedded, Thelma kicks off her floppies,
An Abomination* Ice-gleamed streets, sky an ebony… and a girl accordions her tiny car into the back of mine. She, carmine-streamed, head throug…
Hilarious Slants on Being Told You Have Prostate Cancer Can you empathize with Wile E. C… at that moment when he freezes in the air,
Kinds of Dignity 1. A Parade: Once in his life the veteran had a chance to do a t… remote from termites, drains and f…
Kinkade Faces Reality* To coda played by lonely whippoorw… A tiny cottage dons its dusk-dark… And snuggles into undulating hills… Its chimney twisting just a curl o…
Drama 101 Belief in righteousness began the… Fanaticism breeds most violence: See Beowulf remove poor Grendel’s… To conquer (from his view) malevol…