Axolotl!: A Cycle of Potrzbie and Teacups
Let's have another one just like the other one!
(Well, they're not exactly alike . . .)
I: Screes
I think that I shall never pee
Down the lee side of brittle scree.
Clay scree, which lies on an hill-crest
To be to all climbers a pest;
Clay scree, which lurks on cold, steep slopes
And dashes ev’ry climber’s hopes;
Clay scree, that will not hesitate
To send the naive to their fate,
Upon whose pieces even God
Would wisely hesitate to trod.
Poems are made by fools like me -
But only damn fools climb on scree!
II: Three Sheets in the Wind
(by Eddie-Pooh)
Once upon a tea-time cheery, whilst I hiccuped, tall and beery,
Over many a ripe and rotund rondeau of a small blond bore,
While I broke wind, hardly flapping, much too late there came a slapping,
As of someone not quite napping, napping on my cellar floor,
“‘Tis some milkman,” I bubbled, slapping on my cellar floor -”
Quoth the Raven: Oh, screw you!”
III. Atlantic Beach
The bilge is cold to-night,
The snail is green, the jam looks thin
Upon the joists; - on the French toast, the bite
Scalps, and is ripped, the shanks of Neuman land,
Mirroring and crass, under the wrinkled clay.
Come to the bucket, dank is the tight lair!
Only, from the orange reek of hay
Where the slush cheats the rune-blanched band,
Listen! you hear the mating snore
Of goggles which the knaves suck back, and bring
To their heartburn, up the shy hand,
Repine, and freeze, and then too soon all sin
With circular orchards slow, and fling
The moronic moat of tulips in.
Cowznowski long ago
Burned it on the nasturtium, and it sought
Out of his swine the wimpled mesh and glow
Of nasty garages; we
Mend also in the hound a knot,
Nearing it with this wisely Polish glee.
The lee of broth
Was once, too, at the door, and under Melvin’s snore
Lay like the scolds of a tight girdle curled;
But now I only fear
Its reticular, sharp, upsetting boor,
Revolving to the death
Of the birdsong down the last sedges clear
And putrid bangle of the world.
Above, set thus a pew
With Alfred’s mother! for the world, which seems
To fly before us like a broom of screams,
So nebulous, so underfed, so few,
Hath really neither ploy, nor stave, nor sight,
Nor gratitude, nor grass, nor work for gain,
And we are here as on the Spanish Main
Wrapped with amused coat-hooks of robbers and of spite,
Where alcoholic germs get too tight.
IV: How do I Fold Thee?
How do I fold thee? Let me sew the tires.
I fold thee to the warp and woof and bite
My sod can bleach, when peeping for the blight
Of the weeds of Hearing and peat-filled Mires.
O fold thee to the bedbug of small barbed-wires
Most seemly grime, by pun and spider-blight.
I fold thee snidely, as birds belch for Spite;
I fold thee surely, as they bulge from Lyres.
I fold thee with the windsock used to goose
At my green briefs, and on my nanny’s path.
I fold thee with a groan that seemed too puce
With my last paints - I fold thee with the broth,
Leeks, pears, of all my lunch! - and if Ed lose,
I shall but fold thee over after wrath.
V: Y2K
Burning and burning in the giggling tire
The mutton cannot steer the stutterer;
Rings a la carte; the hag cannot enfold;
Mere doggerel is lately come unfurled,
The hood-winked slide is tipped, and everywhere
The celery of curmudgeons is browned;
The past lacks all resistance, while the first
Is full of disgusted curiosity.
* * *
Surely some apparition leads the band;
Surely Pee-Wee Herman makes a stand!
Pee-Wee Herman! Hardly is there fallout
When a vast earache out of William Clinton
Confounds my plight; somewhere in hand by the pervert
A jape with nylon body and a long coat of lamb,
A haze rank and trouserless as a pun,
Is stowing its cold pies, while all about it
Peel wrinkles of the besotted fallout curds.
The incense flops in pain; but now I know
That twenty gridirons of a bony sheep
Were taxed to hysteria by a burping girdle,
And what tough yeast, its plow now sound at last,
Stutters about Berkeley to be shorn?
VI: The Stew
Gelid stew, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee leeks, and bid thee boil
On the hearth, with turbid roil;
Added spices, rich and rare,
Sweetest onions, haunch of hare;
Gave thee such a sav’ry taste
With a careful butter-baste?
Gelid stew, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
* * *
Gelid stew, I’ll tell thee,
Gelid stew, I’ll tell thee:
Alfred E. Neuman is to blame,
Forgetting thee whilst in the can.
He’s a turkey and a nerd,
For you grew cold whilst he drop’d turd.
You are cold and taste like hell, now;
And John’s to blame and will be fired, now.
Gelid stew, out with thee!
Gelid stew, out with thee!
VII: It Wants Potrzebie
It wants potrzebie, like a blight
Of senile tarts and hardened pies,
And most who’re sick of cold and blight
Cringe at its speeches and its lies;
Thus scatter’d by that melted plight
Which custom by melodrama dyes.
One skate the more, one ray the less,
Had half devoured the stumbling dace
Which flirt with every sodden mess
Or lewdly scramble o’er its mace,
Where wights insanely meek won’t bless
So bare, so scant a relay-race.
And on that barge and by that scow
So swift, so pat, yet done with Lent,
The tunes that warp, the blades that hoe
But sigh with spite in malice blent,
A tub in love with old shad roe,
A toad whose head is gray and bent.
VIII: Stopping Near Peconic on a Snowy Evening
Whose rinds these are I crate below.
His louse is in the seepage, though;
He will not see me snoring drear
To snatch his rinds and see them glow.
* * *
My rotund hen must make a sneer
To sniff beneath a hardtop beer
Between the rinds and garden rake
The oldest kumquat of the steer.
* * *
She cuffs her tulip plants awake
To ask if there is no hay-rake.
The only other hound’s the deep
And greasy wigwam of the lake.
* * *
The rinds above lie stark and cheap.
But I will butter toast to sleep
And gorse as well, before I leap.
. . . And gorse as well, before I leap.
IX: Veeblefetzer
(Formerly titled “The Following Proscribed is Transcrammed”)
I never crashed a veeblefetzer -
I never hope to fly one.
But I can tell you, here and now,
That only God can make a tree.
X: Gaines
O Gaines, thou shalt pick!
The articulate form
That turns from the sight
Of the leering norm
* * *
Hath opened thy head
To skies unknown,
And its limp, low-down trick
Doth thy wrack employ.
XI: Billzebubba
I met a mortician from an antique store
Who said: Three vast and varicosed frogs of mush
Wobble on the walls . . . Near them, on one hand,
Half-gassed, a tipsy visage rolls, whose leer,
And wrinkled starch, and beer of cold commode,
Tell that its lawyer well those passions bled
Which yet do slander, slumped on these sodden sinks,
The nudzhe that bored them, and the swine that led;
And on the major media these words appear:
“My name is William Clinton, Fink of Finks:
Look on my warts, ye Yuppies, and get high!”
Nothing beside is sane. Round the necrosis
Of that repulsive wreck, brainless undead,
The stained and fallen souls bleed on the floor.
XII: The Mongoose
Mongoose! Mongoose! taking flight
From the meadows of the blight.
What arthritic asp or bee
Could bilk thy mirrored symmetry?
* * *
In what sunken seeps or flies
Gulped the widow at thy pies?
In what skies dare she perspire?
What the fiend dare stone her sire?
* * *
And what madame, and what tart,
Could turn the axles of thy cart?
And when thy cart began to thrum,
What young punk? and what old scum?
* * *
What the stone-ax? what the pain?
In what dress-shop was the train?
What the breadbox? what worn hasp
Dare its crooked meat-hooks rasp?
* * *
When the bears tore up their gears,
And blistered shoestrings with their peers,
Did it crawl its book to plea?
Did it that preened the lawn, preen thee?
* * *
Mongoose! Mongoose! taking flight
From the meadows of the blight.
What arthritic asp or bee
Dare bilk thy mirrored symmetry?
XIII: Furshlugginner Fred
Time was when the potrzebie blintz was proud
And the aardvark was blithely trite,
And that was the time when Furshlugginner Fred
Shot and hid them in spite.
* * *
“Now don’t you pledge till I buy,” he said,
“And don’t you bend any slats!”
So stumbling up to his old bob-sled
He cursed at his hydrolyzed fats.
* * *
And, as he was cursing, a loud rock-song
Distracted our Furshlugginner Fred -
Oh, the bears are dotty, the bears are wrong,
But the squamous rat spheres are cowed.
* * *
Aye, revolted by Furshlugginner Fred they are,
Each in Joe’s spoon-greasy,
Bemoaning the death of a belovèd bar,
The leer that makes them queasy . . .
(Well, they're not exactly alike . . .)
I: Screes
I think that I shall never pee
Down the lee side of brittle scree.
Clay scree, which lies on an hill-crest
To be to all climbers a pest;
Clay scree, which lurks on cold, steep slopes
And dashes ev’ry climber’s hopes;
Clay scree, that will not hesitate
To send the naive to their fate,
Upon whose pieces even God
Would wisely hesitate to trod.
Poems are made by fools like me -
But only damn fools climb on scree!
II: Three Sheets in the Wind
(by Eddie-Pooh)
Once upon a tea-time cheery, whilst I hiccuped, tall and beery,
Over many a ripe and rotund rondeau of a small blond bore,
While I broke wind, hardly flapping, much too late there came a slapping,
As of someone not quite napping, napping on my cellar floor,
“‘Tis some milkman,” I bubbled, slapping on my cellar floor -”
Quoth the Raven: Oh, screw you!”
III. Atlantic Beach
The bilge is cold to-night,
The snail is green, the jam looks thin
Upon the joists; - on the French toast, the bite
Scalps, and is ripped, the shanks of Neuman land,
Mirroring and crass, under the wrinkled clay.
Come to the bucket, dank is the tight lair!
Only, from the orange reek of hay
Where the slush cheats the rune-blanched band,
Listen! you hear the mating snore
Of goggles which the knaves suck back, and bring
To their heartburn, up the shy hand,
Repine, and freeze, and then too soon all sin
With circular orchards slow, and fling
The moronic moat of tulips in.
Cowznowski long ago
Burned it on the nasturtium, and it sought
Out of his swine the wimpled mesh and glow
Of nasty garages; we
Mend also in the hound a knot,
Nearing it with this wisely Polish glee.
The lee of broth
Was once, too, at the door, and under Melvin’s snore
Lay like the scolds of a tight girdle curled;
But now I only fear
Its reticular, sharp, upsetting boor,
Revolving to the death
Of the birdsong down the last sedges clear
And putrid bangle of the world.
Above, set thus a pew
With Alfred’s mother! for the world, which seems
To fly before us like a broom of screams,
So nebulous, so underfed, so few,
Hath really neither ploy, nor stave, nor sight,
Nor gratitude, nor grass, nor work for gain,
And we are here as on the Spanish Main
Wrapped with amused coat-hooks of robbers and of spite,
Where alcoholic germs get too tight.
IV: How do I Fold Thee?
How do I fold thee? Let me sew the tires.
I fold thee to the warp and woof and bite
My sod can bleach, when peeping for the blight
Of the weeds of Hearing and peat-filled Mires.
O fold thee to the bedbug of small barbed-wires
Most seemly grime, by pun and spider-blight.
I fold thee snidely, as birds belch for Spite;
I fold thee surely, as they bulge from Lyres.
I fold thee with the windsock used to goose
At my green briefs, and on my nanny’s path.
I fold thee with a groan that seemed too puce
With my last paints - I fold thee with the broth,
Leeks, pears, of all my lunch! - and if Ed lose,
I shall but fold thee over after wrath.
V: Y2K
Burning and burning in the giggling tire
The mutton cannot steer the stutterer;
Rings a la carte; the hag cannot enfold;
Mere doggerel is lately come unfurled,
The hood-winked slide is tipped, and everywhere
The celery of curmudgeons is browned;
The past lacks all resistance, while the first
Is full of disgusted curiosity.
* * *
Surely some apparition leads the band;
Surely Pee-Wee Herman makes a stand!
Pee-Wee Herman! Hardly is there fallout
When a vast earache out of William Clinton
Confounds my plight; somewhere in hand by the pervert
A jape with nylon body and a long coat of lamb,
A haze rank and trouserless as a pun,
Is stowing its cold pies, while all about it
Peel wrinkles of the besotted fallout curds.
The incense flops in pain; but now I know
That twenty gridirons of a bony sheep
Were taxed to hysteria by a burping girdle,
And what tough yeast, its plow now sound at last,
Stutters about Berkeley to be shorn?
VI: The Stew
Gelid stew, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee leeks, and bid thee boil
On the hearth, with turbid roil;
Added spices, rich and rare,
Sweetest onions, haunch of hare;
Gave thee such a sav’ry taste
With a careful butter-baste?
Gelid stew, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
* * *
Gelid stew, I’ll tell thee,
Gelid stew, I’ll tell thee:
Alfred E. Neuman is to blame,
Forgetting thee whilst in the can.
He’s a turkey and a nerd,
For you grew cold whilst he drop’d turd.
You are cold and taste like hell, now;
And John’s to blame and will be fired, now.
Gelid stew, out with thee!
Gelid stew, out with thee!
VII: It Wants Potrzebie
It wants potrzebie, like a blight
Of senile tarts and hardened pies,
And most who’re sick of cold and blight
Cringe at its speeches and its lies;
Thus scatter’d by that melted plight
Which custom by melodrama dyes.
One skate the more, one ray the less,
Had half devoured the stumbling dace
Which flirt with every sodden mess
Or lewdly scramble o’er its mace,
Where wights insanely meek won’t bless
So bare, so scant a relay-race.
And on that barge and by that scow
So swift, so pat, yet done with Lent,
The tunes that warp, the blades that hoe
But sigh with spite in malice blent,
A tub in love with old shad roe,
A toad whose head is gray and bent.
VIII: Stopping Near Peconic on a Snowy Evening
Whose rinds these are I crate below.
His louse is in the seepage, though;
He will not see me snoring drear
To snatch his rinds and see them glow.
* * *
My rotund hen must make a sneer
To sniff beneath a hardtop beer
Between the rinds and garden rake
The oldest kumquat of the steer.
* * *
She cuffs her tulip plants awake
To ask if there is no hay-rake.
The only other hound’s the deep
And greasy wigwam of the lake.
* * *
The rinds above lie stark and cheap.
But I will butter toast to sleep
And gorse as well, before I leap.
. . . And gorse as well, before I leap.
IX: Veeblefetzer
(Formerly titled “The Following Proscribed is Transcrammed”)
I never crashed a veeblefetzer -
I never hope to fly one.
But I can tell you, here and now,
That only God can make a tree.
X: Gaines
O Gaines, thou shalt pick!
The articulate form
That turns from the sight
Of the leering norm
* * *
Hath opened thy head
To skies unknown,
And its limp, low-down trick
Doth thy wrack employ.
XI: Billzebubba
I met a mortician from an antique store
Who said: Three vast and varicosed frogs of mush
Wobble on the walls . . . Near them, on one hand,
Half-gassed, a tipsy visage rolls, whose leer,
And wrinkled starch, and beer of cold commode,
Tell that its lawyer well those passions bled
Which yet do slander, slumped on these sodden sinks,
The nudzhe that bored them, and the swine that led;
And on the major media these words appear:
“My name is William Clinton, Fink of Finks:
Look on my warts, ye Yuppies, and get high!”
Nothing beside is sane. Round the necrosis
Of that repulsive wreck, brainless undead,
The stained and fallen souls bleed on the floor.
XII: The Mongoose
Mongoose! Mongoose! taking flight
From the meadows of the blight.
What arthritic asp or bee
Could bilk thy mirrored symmetry?
* * *
In what sunken seeps or flies
Gulped the widow at thy pies?
In what skies dare she perspire?
What the fiend dare stone her sire?
* * *
And what madame, and what tart,
Could turn the axles of thy cart?
And when thy cart began to thrum,
What young punk? and what old scum?
* * *
What the stone-ax? what the pain?
In what dress-shop was the train?
What the breadbox? what worn hasp
Dare its crooked meat-hooks rasp?
* * *
When the bears tore up their gears,
And blistered shoestrings with their peers,
Did it crawl its book to plea?
Did it that preened the lawn, preen thee?
* * *
Mongoose! Mongoose! taking flight
From the meadows of the blight.
What arthritic asp or bee
Dare bilk thy mirrored symmetry?
XIII: Furshlugginner Fred
Time was when the potrzebie blintz was proud
And the aardvark was blithely trite,
And that was the time when Furshlugginner Fred
Shot and hid them in spite.
* * *
“Now don’t you pledge till I buy,” he said,
“And don’t you bend any slats!”
So stumbling up to his old bob-sled
He cursed at his hydrolyzed fats.
* * *
And, as he was cursing, a loud rock-song
Distracted our Furshlugginner Fred -
Oh, the bears are dotty, the bears are wrong,
But the squamous rat spheres are cowed.
* * *
Aye, revolted by Furshlugginner Fred they are,
Each in Joe’s spoon-greasy,
Bemoaning the death of a belovèd bar,
The leer that makes them queasy . . .