Short Poems

I never have seen a vagabond who really liked to roam
All up and down the streets of the world and not to have a home:
The tramp who slept in your barn last night and left at break of day
Will wander only until he finds another place to stay.

Riddle-me riddle-me riddle-me-ree,
Perhaps you can tell what this riddle may be:
As deep as a house, as round as a cup,
And all the king's horses can't draw it up.
( A Well )

" This must be a record, " he thinks. But when he herds his catch into his truck, and drives to Fish & Game, they tell him, " This isn't a walleye or a trout. It's not even a gar. Just throw it back. "
That takes some work — it weighs a ton, seems to be growing, and has started trumpeting — but he gets it to the river, shoves it, tusks first, into a deep pool, then sits, panting, fascinated by the way green lichens on the rock mirror the mountains overhead.

Rich Lazarus! richer in those Gems, thy Teares,
Then Dives in the Roabes he weares:
He scornes them now, but o they'l sute full well
With th' Purple he must weare in Hell.

Rhinoceros, your hide looks all undone,
You do not take my fancy in the least:
You have a horn where other brutes have none:
Rhinoceros, you are an ugly beast.

The rhino is a homely beast,
For human eyes he's not a feast.
Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros,
I'll stare at something less prepoceros.

" Reincarnating Pythagoras, say:
How shall the new-shaped Marcus greet his day?"
" Who's he?" " That kidnapper of scoundrel mind,
That late seducer of the male kind,
That " pilfering, perverted paedophile " ,
To borrow Lucilius' lofty style."
" Oh, him. No bull nor hippocamel he;
A dung-beetle shall nasty Marcus be!"

On the E: of Essex

Essex who swae'd the sword so long till he
Thought fitt that to resigne which forct might be,
Is here intombde; yet mist of both his ends:
Lov'd of his foes, and hated of his friends.

Put your
self out
and you're
not quite
up to
it or

Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been?
I've been to London to look at the Queen.
Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse under the chair.