Wrestling in Verse with an absurd murderer

Dreams of Little Old Poems

They sang, back then, of a blue catarrh and guitars

Of little balloon men and wheelbarrows brimming with verse;

There were stumble-bums and roustabouts to rhyme

With scallywags and pickaninnies or worse.

Sleds that slid into icy ponds and barrel girls

And boys when floods got out of control,

Stanzas full of flying monkeys, rapunzels,

Socks striped in red and white, the woollen sky

Ablaze with witches and tornados, like an albatross

Seeking habitats on sullen shores, tame gazelles.

In days of yore, back then, when time began, a toss

And a hank of yarn, all things were possible, a smidge

Of this, a snort of that, then all across the ridge

The hoofers hoofed and the jongleurs began their cry .

Where Does Word-Pay Ever Get You?

Calumnies and calamities, clam-bake ditties

Off Martha’s curlicue coast, then bisque

For the Basques near Charlemagne’s cities,

Like two towns called Tripoli where they whisk

You away from the high seas, like La Scala’s

Divas at the top of the scale in weight and tone.

All is operatic piracy, pie à la

Mode, arias with ice cream in MilAn,

A thousand years ago, said Millicent Anne,

Or eleventy hundred. She was a militant,

My lovely Tanta Millie, with her High-C.

Her symbol was a simple cymbal’s crash.

A sample of which was Mr Whippee’s screech,

Eskimo pie, the friendly humour man,

And finally a frutti-titti in a cup size c,

As though that were all along the plan.

The Tangled Bank

He tumbled down the bank into a ditch,

Tangled roots and branches intermingled,

Then where there were species he saw a switch,

But why he could not tell, until there tingled

Inside his brain, where vessels of all kinds

Sang out: Come and grasp or escape and flee!

Something like this made fighting couples bind

And lovers in the darkness turn two to three.

What intergalactic force makes choices choose

Unknowingly the invisible threads, the seeds,

The never-ending conjugations? What ruse

Arouses the flowers ecstasy and speeds

Eternity out of silent years? What sterile joy

Is capable of such a crime as to destroy

The universe inside an infant’s toy