(1994)
Republished by permission from "Lyric," Vol. 74, No. 3
#DescriptiveHumorousQuatrain
The Seven Virtues Six centuries ago a pope devised A list of sins he thought should b… But now we see the list must be re… For calling virtues sins will neve…
The Golden Yoke On this, our fiftieth, we find We’re Siamese twins conjoined by… To share all things of heart and m… Like blessings, curses, smiles and…
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…
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…
A Sixtieth Anniversary: Oedipus… Attraction through the eye, the li… Portrays the blazing start of this… For years that magnetism did not w… Remained the stuff to move a sonne…
Anna Nicole Smith (I would have been happy to let he… Had I not heard a little girl on… Smith could have been happy in Te… serving burgers and bedding rednec…
The Domestic Life of the Elephan… Elephants, Lawrence wrote,** let love bloom slowly “in their vast shy hearts.” But Lawrence dreamed.
System Restore I punched one day a strange comput… That spawned an endless lunatic pa… Across the screen of visual debris That I could not remove, still wo…
My Last Trophy-Wife (Apologies to Robert Browning) That photo of my ex there on the… Is one I took before we split las… Yeah, people always ask me how I…
,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,
Elephants, Lawrence wrote,* let love bloom slowly “in their vast shy hearts.” But Lawrence dreamed. The beasts, it’s true, were once
Boundaries Tracing writhing streams, circling alpine wastes, tickling out a finger nudged between two behemoths,
Aesop as Existentialist They’d suffered through a devasta… And many larvae died from lack of… The queen, as well, grew thin for… Thus forcing all the workers to co…
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…
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…