"In The Beginning Was The Word"

—for my A and Ω, Eleni—who knows me better than I do myself 

Why is it when I at last 
Give in and grudgingly promise 
To translate a few of my more 
"Knotty” avant-garde poems 
For you, my not-so-comfy with English 
Better half, half-way into them I get 
That nagging sense you think 
They were all Greek to me too, 
From their promising beginnings 
To nowhere in particular 
In the end. 

"There's A Sucker Born Every Minute"

—attributed to P. T. Barnum, American showman 


Believe it or not, 

I read somewhere that 
Some land snails can 

Lift ten times their weight 
Up a vertical surface; 

So if you were as strong as that 
And sucked just as well 

And weighed in 
At one hundred-fifty pounds, 

Hauling one thousand five hundred 
Pounds of suckers would more than likely 

Drive you straight up a wall. 

Bereft

Oh, wanting 
Apostrophe, the comma’s 

Always somewhere 

Here to make you, 
Pause to think about it.

Invasion Of The Slug People

No need to fret beforehand— 
You earthlings will know when 

We’ve taken over everything 
When you no longer have enough 

Time to shovel the slime 
You’ve left behind. 

Huuklyeand Cinquor On Purveyors Of Genetically Modified Crapolla

You sod busting deviant turds you 

Keep on grinding out this bull 
Husking horseshit and before you 
Know it y’all be corn 

Holed by an ear-to-ear 
Grinning sodomite 
Grim Reaper, got it? 

Good. 


Moderator’s comments: Huuk demonstrating his fiery didacticism once more; too bad he had to stoop so low this time—linguistically speaking—to get his rapier-wielding point across. 

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Been there 
Before been through all that 
With the required modicum 
Of grace they told me 
I’d find everything as it was, 
Save the whereabouts 
Of my face. 

Variations On A Theme By Williams

"There are lots of things we have to go and find out. 
We have to go and find out, what red, what wheel 
and barrow are, at some level." -- Paul Muldoon 

perhaps this is why 

so much depends 
upon 

the glazed-over rimed 
blue 

eyes of the stricken 
farmer in the muck 

beside the dazed 
white chickens, 

the frozen up- 
ended 

wheel of the red 
barrow, the fouled 

furrows of the mind gone 
plowing somewhere off 

in the lowermost reaches 
of ground zero.