(Poem #251)Song to Onions
They improve everything, pork chops to soup, And not only that but each onion's a group. Peel back the skin, delve into tissue And see how an onion has been blessed with issue. Every layer produces an ovum: You think you've got three then you find you've got fovum. Onion on on— Ion on onion they run, Each but the smallest one's some onion's mother: An onion comprises a half-dozen other. In sum then an onion you could say is less Than the sum of its parts. But then I like things that more are than profess— In food and the arts. Things pungent, not tony. I'll take Damon Runyon Over Antonioni— Who if an i wanders becomes Anti-onion. I'm anti-baloney. Although a baloney sandwich would Right now, with onions, be right good. And so would sliced onions, Chewed with cheese, Or onions chopped and sprinkled Over black-eyed peas: Black-eyed, grey-gravied, absorbent of essences, eaten on New Year's Eve peas. |
Song to Onions -- Roy Blount Jr.
To Happiness -- Carl Dennis
(Poem #250)To Happiness
If you're not approaching, I hope at least You're off to comfort someone who needs you more, Not lost wandering aimlessly Or drawn to the shelter of well-lit rooms Where people assume you've arrived already. If you're coming this way, send me the details— The name of the ship, the port it leaves from— So I can be down on the dock to help you Unload your valises, your trunks and boxes And stow them in the big van I'll have rented. I'd like this to be no weekend stay Where a single change of clothes is sufficient. Bring clothes for all seasons, enough to fill a closet; And instead of a single book for the bedside table Bring boxes of all your favorites. I'll be eager to clear half my shelves to make room, Eager to read any titles you recommend. If we've many in common, feel free to suggest They prove my disposition isn't to blame For your long absence, just some problems of attitude, A few bad habits you'll help me set to one side. We can start at dinner, which you're welcome To cook for us while I sweep and straighten And set the table. Then light the candles You've brought from afar for the occasion. Light them and fill the room I supposed I knew With a glow that shows me I was mistaken. Then help me decide if I'm still the person I was Or someone else, someone who always believed in you And imagined no good reasons for your delay. |
They Should Have Asked My Husband -- Pam Ayres
(Poem #249)They Should Have Asked My Husband
You know this world is complicated, imperfect and oppressed And it's not hard to feel timid, apprehensive and depressed. It seems that all around us tides of questions ebb and flow And people want solutions but they don't know where to go. Opinions abound but who is wrong and who is right. People need a prophet, a diffuser of the light. Someone they can turn to as the crises rage and swirl. Someone with the remedy, the wisdom, the pearl.. Well, they should have asked my husband, he'd have really gone to town. With his thoughts on immigration, teenage mothers, Gordon Brown, The future of the monarchy, house prices in the south The wait for hip replacements, BSE and foot-and-mouth. Oh, they should have asked my husband, he can sort out any mess, He can rejuvenate the railways, he can cure the NHS So any little niggle, anything you want to know Just run it past my husband, wind him up and let him go. Congestion on the motorways, free holidays for thugs The damage to the ozone layer, refugees, drugs. These may defeat the brain of any politician bloke But present it to my husband and he'll solve it at a stroke. He'll clarify the situation, he will make it crystal clear You'll feel the glazing of your eyeballs, and the bending of your ear. Corruption at the top, he's an authority on that And the Mafia, Gaddafia and Yasser Arafat. Upon these areas he brings his intellect to shine In a great compelling voice that's twice as loud as yours or mine. I often wonder what it must be like to be so strong, Infallible, articulate, self-confident.. and wrong. When it comes to tolerance he hasn't got a lot, Joyriders should be guillotined and muggers should be shot. The sound of his own voice becomes like music to his ears, And he hasn't got an inkling that he's boring us to tears. My friends don't call so often, they have busy lives I know But its not everyday you want to hear a windbag suck and blow. Encyclopaedias, on them we never have to call, Why clutter up the bookshelf when my husband.. knows it all! |
The State of the Economy -- Louis Jenkins
(Poem #248)The State of the Economy
There might be some change on top of the dresser at the back, and we should check the washer and the dryer. Check under the floor mats of the car. The couch cushions. I have some books and CDs I could sell, and there are a couple big bags of aluminum cans in the basement, only trouble is that there isn't enough gas in the car to get around the block. I'm expecting a check sometime next week, which, if we are careful, will get us through to payday. In the meantime with your one— dollar rebate check and a few coins we have enough to walk to the store and buy a quart of milk and a newspaper. On second thought, forget the newspaper. |
I Had a Hippopotamus -- Patrick Barrington
(Poem #247)I Had a Hippopotamus
I had a hippopotamus; I kept him in a shed And fed him upon vitamins and vegetable bread. I made him my companion on many cheery walks, And had his portrait done by a celebrity in chalks. His charming eccentricities were known on every side. The creature's popularity was wonderfully wide. He frolicked with the Rector in a dozen friendly tussles, Who could not but remark on his hippopotamuscles. If he should be affected by depression or the dumps By hippopotameasles or hippopotamumps I never knew a particle of peace 'till it was plain He was hippopotamasticating properly again. I had a hippopotamus, I loved him as a friend But beautiful relationships are bound to have an end. Time takes, alas! our joys from us and robs us of our blisses. My hippopotamus turned out to be a hippopotamissus. My housekeeper regarded him with jaundice in her eye. She did not want a colony of hippopotami; She borrowed a machine gun from her soldier-nephew, Percy And showed my hippopotamus no hippopotamercy. My house now lacks the glamour that the charming creature gave, The garage where I kept him is as silent as a grave. No longer he displays among the motor-tires and spanners His hippopotamastery of hippopotamanners. No longer now he gambols in the orchard in the Spring; No longer do I lead him through the village on a string; No longer in the mornings does the neighborhood rejoice To his hippopotamusically-modulated voice. I had a hippopotamus, but nothing upon the earth Is constant in its happiness or lasting in its mirth. No life that's joyful can be strong enough to smother My sorrow for what might have been a hippopotamother. |
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI) -- William Shakespeare
(Poem #246)Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
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Marriage (Poetry in Motion excerpt) -- Gregory Corso
(Poem #245)Marriage (Poetry in Motion excerpt)
When she introduces me to her parents back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie, should I sit with my knees together on their 3rd degree sofa and not ask Where's the bathroom? How else to feel other than I am, often thinking Flash Gordon soap - O how terrible it must be for a young man seated before a family and the family thinking We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou! After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living? |
Unwise Purchases -- George Bilgere
(Poem #244)Unwise Purchases
They sit around the house not doing much of anything: the boxed set of the complete works of Verdi, unopened. The complete Proust, unread: The French-cut silk shirts which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet and make me look exactly like the kind of middle-aged man who would wear a French-cut silk shirt: The reflector telescope I thought would unlock the mysteries of the heavens but which I only used once or twice to try to find something heavenly in the windows of the high-rise down the road, and which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling when it could be examining the Crab Nebula: The 30-day course in Spanish whose text I never opened, whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed, save for Tape One, where I never learned whether the suave American conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk at a Madrid hotel about the possibility of obtaining a room actually managed to check in. I like to think that one thing led to another between them and that by Tape Six or so they're happily married and raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute. But I'll never know. Suddenly I realize I have constructed the perfect home for a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias, and I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city there lives a woman with, say, a fencing foil gathering dust in the corner near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints drying in their tubes on the table where the violin she bought on a whim lies entombed in the permanent darkness of its locked case next to the abandoned chess set, a woman who has always dreamed of becoming the kind of woman the man I've always dreamed of becoming has always dreamed of meeting. And while the two of them discuss star clusters and Cézanne, while they fence delicately in Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto, she and I will stand in the steamy kitchen, fixing up a little risotto, enjoying a modest cabernet, while talking over a day so ordinary as to seem miraculous. |
Reluctance -- Robert Frost
(Poem #243)Reluctance
Out through the fields and the woods And over the walls I have wended; I have climbed the hills of view And looked at the world, and descended; I have come by the highway home, And lo, it is ended. The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keeping To ravel them one by one And let them go scraping and creeping Out over the crusted snow, When others are sleeping. And the dead leaves lie huddled and still, No longer blown hither and thither; The last lone aster is gone; The flowers of the witch hazel wither; The heart is still aching to seek, But the feet question "Whither?" Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season? |