Whenever you’re feeling
unsure what to do
Then you know what it’s like
every day to be U
Who starts out one way
then turns ‘round halfway through,
no letter’s less decisive
or, maybe, more confused.
Perhaps U’s resemblance
to a horseshoe
Dragged U through the mud
so U’s ego got bruised.
And if U didn’t have
spare ego to lose,
Then U probably grew sheepish.
Imagine, wouldn’t you?
So if one day self-doubt
jams you up with the blues,
Think how hard it would be
if your mirror showed U.
Winston had just one hair left,
and he’d comb it across his head.
He’d even still visit the barber shop monthly
where all of his closest friends said,
“Winnie, good man, why not hack off that weed
and be bald. Just do it, surrender.”
“Expire my follicular force’s last gasp?” Win snarled,
“Never, never, never, never, never.”
“UTAH…GIMME’ TWO!” – Winnie Churchair, pictured wearing the hard top protective case for his last hair (Photo: A. Eisenstaedt).
To keep your barnyard
In a balanced position
The amount of your patience
Must exceed your ambition.
Though it sounds spun around
Don’t make the mistake
To waste the good taste
Of a CupsideDownCake.
All frosting on the bottom
Spongy yellow cake on top
So much yummy sweetness in it
Who could care that it’s flip-flopped?
Yes, deserting a dessert
Because it has a scrambled look
Is an eating sin akin
To “Trusting Skinny Cooks.”
We have an Aunt problem:
She squeezes our cheeks,
Her cooking is awful,
Her perfume…it reeks.
We have an Aunt problem:
She knits us clothes we don’t like.
At times she is gassy,
She ran over our bikes.
We have an Aunt problem:
And it won’t go away.
What’s that there … cash in those cards from her?
Why Auntie, please stay!
Peter’s senses observed
until his notebooks were full
the heat of July,
the blossoms of April,
October’s colored leaves,
December’s deep freezin’,
yes, Peter wrote stories
about every season.
And he loved all his lines,
from the first to the last,
till that fateful day
in Geography class,
the moment he learned
what happens to weather
when it travels down south
below the equator
where December gets steamy
and July has snowballs,
October pops buds
and April is Fall.
Peter worried his work
if published abroad
would make him seem like
an unworldly fraud.
But then his frown flipped as
he wrote these introductory words,
“If reading this in the southern hemisphere,
please do so upside down and backwards.”
Pete’s misfit climate was —
Like that! — a win.
‘And all it required,’ he thought,
‘Was one spin.’
L’il Sissy is a spoon
always stirrin’ stirrin’ stirrin’,
Li’l Sissy is a kitty
always purrin’ purrin purrin’,
Li’l Sissy makes me giggle
how she coos coos coos,
which makes Mama laugh and say,
“Your Sis reminds me of you.”
I say, “Mama that’s silly,
I’m growin’ growin’ growin,
A big strong brave kid
filled with knowin’ knowin’ knowin’”.
She smiles’n’says “Yes,
but even though that may be true
Mama can still see the
itty bitty kitty spoon in you.”
Always welcome to your home
guests who say they’ll break your “things,”
when icicles are what they mean by “things.”
(Photo: PaC)
Tell balloons that you know
in whom dancing passions rage
to visit our Magic Heat Vent,
the Inflatable World’s stage.
When our furnace kicks on, the hot air shoots up
from the flat vent built into the floor
and as long as the warm gusts continue,
the dreams of aspiring balloon dancers soar.
As if choreographed by the swirling heat
balloons rise and climb by the wall,
they bounce up and down, but don’t touch the ground,
‘cause their partner wind won’t let them fall.
In spring when our furnace goes off for the season
the Heat Vent performances stop,
and the dancing balloons all drift back down to Earth
telling tales of winters spent on top.
It fell from a cloud
It fluttered around
From tree branch to garden,
All across town.
It hit the ground,
Was kicked back up
And floated onto
The wing of a duck.
A quack and a flap
Launched it again
On a skyward ride rarer
Than a tooth in a hen.
The view it had during
These falls and rises
Was chock fulla fun,
Adventure, surprises,
The real life kind sweeter
Than cookies or cake
That shows how cool it is
To be a snowflake.
FOR REALCICLE – This is a photo of an actual snowflake, captured by photographer Douglas Levere. To see more incredible images from his snowflake gallery, click here.
Zoom-zoom!
All around our room
Sister and me
Rolled a ball, one-two-three!
When-woopsy-daisy-
I rolled one too lazy
And under the bed the ball veered
And disappeared.
That’s when trying to recover it
Sis’n’I discovered it:
A dust mammoth so large
And – we swear – about to charge
Thru the regular under-bed-dust-creature zone
To scare we intruders from its dust home.
Our fear and respect for the beast was so great
there was no time to consider our misplaced ball’s fate.
So from the dust mammoth’s sight we retreated
Any hope to recover the ball now depleted.
Right away we found Mom and told her the tale
And right away came her answer, a Mom-one, without fail:
“If you’re afraid of dust creatures bigger than a dust mouse,
Then if I were you I wouldn’t play ball in the house.”
Each year the seasons germs and frost
prompted scores of fret
in the world famous Busskill singers,
The No Waiting Room Quartet.
They said, “It’s simple, really,
when we’re sick we just can’t sing
Any more than a slinky can
Slink stairs on a broken spring.”
So when the duo Cough’n’Sniffle
put The Quartet to the test,
it would quiz right back with a three pack
of Juice and Soup and Rest.
And when its Song of Winter
became a four-cough-harmony,
The Quartet tuned up a dose of health
with cords of Vitamin C.
Because the No Waiting Room Quartet
was not content waiting around
under blankets doing nothing
when there were songs to be sung about town.
The Foansillies never ending
quest is for a ring.
Their evergoing search occurs
staring at the Thing
gripped tight as their Foansilly
Palm can grip it.
From out of their hands
not a Strongman could rip it.
Forever I wondered
about this Foansilly way
‘til I met one once,
and said to him, “Hey,
Should a ring from that Thing
one day arise,
how will you contain yourself
at the surprise?
For it seems all Foansillies
spend all their time searching,
Has any among you
yet found anything?
Or could it be, maybe,
that there is no ring??”
This Foansilly laughed at me,
“No, of course not.
There are so many rings, there are more than a lot.
It isn’t one ring
we Foansillies chase.
It’s the next ring…then the next…on and on. like outer space!”
I said, “But that search sounds like
time not well spent.”
“Well perhaps,” he replied,
“Our name’s no accident.”
“Can a cantaloupe
elope to a slope
with an antelope
in an envelope?”
Said a jackalope
to a taupe-clad pope
who hoped against hope
to sell soap on a rope.
“Well it might make you mope,
but you’ll learn how to cope,
and no, you’re not a dope,”
said the pope, “but, nope.
A cantaloupe
can’t elope to a slope
with an antelope
in an envelope.”
There’s a Drooling Machine at our house
They call it “The Baby Boy.”
It’s cuddly and cute and I squeeze it
Though Mom insists it’s not a toy.
It runs like a faucet that’s broken
Leaking everywhere all through the day
But when I grab a wrench to fix the Machine
Mom insists, “Put that away!”
She says, “The Boy’s doing exactly
What it should be at this stage!”
I say “Buyer Beware”’s a good lesson
For shoppers of every age
Lest they get stuck with a Drooling Machine
For which they must apologize
With some on-going lie there’s no way they believe, like,
“Isn’t he the cutest little guy?”
There was no hesitation
When we asked Sergei Surprise,
“Where is winter coldest,
in your well traveled eyes?
“Petersburg?.. Minsk??
… Kiev??? …. Oslo????”
Said Sergei, “Nyet, nyet.
Much colder, Chicago.”
Of a world devoid of violence
he could only dream
as the Peace-Loving Chef
beat eggs and whipped cream.
From the sketchbook, circa February 2015.
My fuzzy gloves that are fingerless
Send me palms over knuckles with digital bliss
On the winter days I’m earwax picking,
Scratching backs, guitar licking,
Pinching jacks, popping pimples,
Cleaning braces, poking dimples,
Tying laces, tickling bellies,
Needle threading, tasting jellies,
Rabbit foot petting, booger flicking,
Yo-yo twirling, paper football kicking,
Portraying a Shadow-Squirrel, snatching a donut hole,
Lapping cookie dough trails from Mom’s mixing bowl.
But when it’s really cold outside and time to shovel snow,
Mittens that cover my fingers are what I wish I had in tow.
There’s nothing in this world
more sweet than Sarah Jane –
except when she gets hangry,
then her sweet goes down the drain.
See, “Hanger” is an emptiness
bigger than a garage for a plane,
a vacuum in the stomach
that grumble rumbles to the brain.
And when hangriness descends
upon sweet Sarah Jane,
her sugar turns to salt –
and mountains of it, not a grain.
She snarls and barks
like an angry Great Dane,
fuses bulge in her neck
where normally there’d be veins.
But when again her belly’s full
she goes from hangry back to sane,
and to the world returns
sweet little Sarah Jane.
In the supermarket there is one aisle
That is my favorite by a mile.
It’s not where they sell sugary snacks,
Soda, cereal or have the toy racks.
It’s near the sponges, past the Kleenex,
A cottony wonder from floor to apex:
It’s Toilet Paper Mountain, in all its glory,
Beside Paper Towel Castle,
which everyone must see.
But for me, I’m afraid, seeing’s not enough.
I have to scale these towers of puff.
Mom and Dad don’t like when I climb,
They put me back in the cart every time.
Then I’m apart from my grocery store friends:
Paper Towel Castle and Toilet Paper Mountain.
And I must turn to plotting for the next time
That to those absorbent summits I can climb.
It marks the spot
From the last it is third
But for x-ray
It starts almost no words.
Expunges
Expires
Examines
Extolls
Elixir, a mixer
Ex post facto.
In both cases it looks the same
Like Cousin C
It’s a cross only not straight up
Like Cousin T.
Explaining
Exerting
Expatriating
Extant, exacting
Exasperating
There’s no alphabet king
No one “Letter Rex”
But in Alphabetowne
There’s no one quite like X
A balding billygoat
Bought a new billy-weave,
Now he’s happy as a lonely coral who joined a reef.
A homeless cuckoo
Asked for the time,
And found a roof in a clock that now he calls “mine.”
My hooks were a mess
Till I hung’em on a hook,
My nooks all misplaced, then I stored’em in a nook.
So asking and acting
Proves, as you can see:
“If it’s going to be, it’s up to me.”
It does no good
To just look good
When real good you could achieve
Because doing can rarely be misconstrued
While appearances
Often deceive.
That’s why the straightest, strongest, tallest
“KEEP OUT” sign there is
Will always be more askew than
The crookedest “WELCOME” sign in the biz.
(Photo: PaC)
There are dentists everywhere
But not the kind I’d like to be,
That’s the kind who earns a living
Mending broken zipper teeth.
‘Cause as far as I can tell
Right now there’s no doc you can see
Who can take a fly or jacket that
Won’t move and set it free.
So the Earth’s first zipper dentist
Is what I would like it to be:
The foremost expert on the planet’s
Mechanical metal teeth.
Not because you have enough of them to flaunt,
but when they’re what they want
are eggs the ideal gift.
Tweed Typewriter 