Rhinitis in Pachyderms

When an elephant has a cold,

I bet that that gets old…

Real fast. Who wants a trunk

That’s stuffed with gunk?

The Beats

In my youth, I always liked the way

Beat poetry cavorted on the page...

Rhythms all irregular, of course,

And not a rhyme scheme there to save your soul!

But with a chanting quality - unprosaic -

Of never becoming merely a boring stream

Of less-than-consciousness lined up discreetly

To please a crowd of academic critics,

Instead, an onslaught of outrageousness

Up in your face and catching at your ears.

With zero fear of speaking loud and clear.

Pennies

I find pennies on the street 

And I toss them in the fountain. 

This makes my luck complete 

In some mythical accounting.

Stoicism

Stoicism has its virtues

But it certainly asks a great deal

When it asks you to suppress

The way that you naturally feel.

Possible

It’s possible to write a sonnet which is so prosaic in its subject matter, that though its meter flows without a hitch, it sounds so much like ordinary patter that if you write it without breaks in lines the unsuspecting reader may not see the format follows classical designs, quite suitable for soaring poetry, but here constricted to dull observations about the fact that verse forms without feeling do little to ignite imaginations and nothing to set tender spirits reeling.  Real poetry requires a certain drive, a pulsing power to make you feel alive.  

One Hundred Feet

How do all those wiggly legs

Fit inside of centipede eggs?

Admittedly, they can run like champs,

But I bet they’re all born with a bad case of cramps!

On the Audit Trail of Kitties

 Yes, Excel was used. Computers leave such nice audit trails of when things got written.

Last night I reviewed how Kitties got written,

How it all started off as a ten minute kitten,

How I soon began to try to extend it

Without much of a clue as to how I might end it.

Feeling my way, an uneasy man,

Writing chunks out of order without a real plan,

But with some vague sense of a story arc

Glimmering distantly in the dark.

Moon

Moon, you hunk of rock, 

You spin around the earth 

Like a big old monthly clock, 

Like a finely tuned machine. 

And… for what it’s worth, 

It would be a nasty shock 

If you altered your routine!