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

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.

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.