Monday, September 26, 2016

Making Passes

Supposedly no one makes passes
at girls wearing rimless eyeglasses,
something my mind soon dismisses
when covering a face with quick kisses,
because a face wearing glasses amasses
resistance to no-glasses smart-asses.

Since my severe brimless eyeglasses
no girl sees as pains in the asses,
nor sees she the need to take classes
in lip-synching met-metastasis
I'll keep making numberless passes
at girls wearing rimless eyeglasses.

Read it with an English or American accent; it should still work...though I prefer the 'English' version, myself.

Originally published on one of my other blogs

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Lincolnshire shepherds count their sheep

Lincolnshire shepherds count their sheep
Preferably to be read in a Lincolnshire accent

When sheep were counted by the head ˗
the count kept in the shepherd’s head ˗
and the carrying of an abacus was abjured,
and the battery-charged electronic calculator was
still a twinkle in its creator’s eye, then
shepherds in Lincolnshire county counted
not in decimal, but vigesimally –
taking in fingers, thumbs and, it’s supposed, toes,
and producing the following dial-up-rhyme
to keep track of their woolly subjects crowns:

Yan tan tethera pethera pimp;
sethera lethera hovera covera dik;
yan-a-dik tan-a-dik
tethera-dik
pethera-dik
bumfit;
yan-a-bumfit
tan-a-bumfit
tethera-bumfit
pethera-bumfit
figgot.

Some words within the groups of five gained
easy traction - tethera, pethera - while
sethera, lethera, hovera, covera made only a
minor mark. And sad to say, pimp and figgot,
words surely on a par for originality with
bumfit and dik, got little room to breathe.

What would the English-speaking world give to
count thus: one, two, three, four,
pimp,
or sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen,
figgot.
The humdrum of twenty stands abashed before
figgot, while five is a
simpleton fricative, cousin to
fünf, or fimf, or fimm,
having none of the former luxury of
pimp (now impoverished, playing a sleazy role).

Let us stand with the sheep and the
shepherds, baring our fingers and toes in the
cold, counting the dag-marked rain-soaked
fleeces, noting each vigesimal group with a
pebble, a notch on our crook, or a mark in the
mud-dank ground, with language that’s old, but proven:

Yan tan tethera pethera pimp;
sethera lethera hovera covera dik;
yan-a-dik tan-a-dik
tethera-dik
pethera-dik
bumfit;
yan-a-bumfit
tan-a-bumfit
tethera-bumfit
pethera-bumfit
figgot.

Coda:
Some women knitting, or counting their
stitches, followed the shepherds’ enumerations,
clicking their needles or twisting their wool,
sewing up jerkin sleeves, braiding men’s britches,
fashioning the gear for their rustic men’s bags of bones,
sewing while stirring hot broths in their iron pots ˗
let us join with the throng of them spread through the land,
wizened or comely or middle-aged matrons, all counting:

Yan tan tethera pethera pimp;
sethera lethera hovera covera dik;
yan-a-dik tan-a-dik
tethera-dik
pethera-dik
bumfit;
yan-a-bumfit
tan-a-bumfit
tethera-bumfit
pethera-bumfit

figgot.

Tuesday, September 06, 2016

Another small dog poem

We breathe the same fresh air,
my dog and I, or breathe it stale;
we sigh the same, the difference
only being in the size of sighs;
we walk the same hard road, the
road is ours, not his or mine;
and when I take a nap, and on the
couch lie long, he lies beside, and
fits himself behind my knees,
warming me, or maybe I warm him. 

When God made the fly

Since flies find their way in
But not out again,

I’d like to know why
When God made the fly

He couldn’t have added
Something that mattered:

A form of reverse.




A short poem that's been hanging around for a long time. I might finally have sorted out what seemed to have been a problem with it.