A Big Bad Modern Day Fairy Tale Rhyme

 

Willie Winkie sits in jail with lots of time to think

He tried to warn us all our stake in privacy would shrink

Someone’s making threats unveiled

Status quo or you’ll get nailed

You’d be best with itch curtailed

Be careful where you wink

 

Scrub your food or you’ll regret the day that you were born

Food with dyes and drugs will try to exit you with scorn

Radiate that mozzarella

Teaming cells with long flagella

Check your source for salmon, Ella

No one wants to mourn

 

Sleeping Beauty, seven dwarves, the first cops did the math

Figured out those guys were tripping down the primrose path

She was sleeping, that’s not good

Plundering her neighborhood

They are not misunderstood

Their type deserves our wrath

 

Jack and Jill were going, not uphill but to his camper

Lacking good protection for their tumble? Not a damper

STDs now STIs

She believed a thousand lies

What’s that red rash on her thighs?

Look at Jackie scamper

 

Think I’ll stay in bed today, the world’s a nasty place

Are we just too dull to handle simple acts of grace?

All behave like thugs, appalling

Lying, looting, bombing, brawling

Chicken Little’s sky is falling

Picking up its pace

 

-- Published April of 2009 on the now-defunct British website Nasty Safari

 

 

Yum

 

Slim pointy tails slip through

my teeth

Slimy slick skin separates from

sweet flesh

Aged rotted curds ooze green

and blue.

 

Spinach salad

 

Yum

 

 

My Brain

 

Wasn't with me today

 

It hid behind my study door,

sunned itself beside a geranium,

sat on the curb with recycling bins

 

It shuffled pages of books and

refused to plan dinner

 

Now it’s hiding under my desk

 

I think I'll have a talk with it

 

Tomorrow.

 

       (September 9, 2020)

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Fugue, Parts I and II

 

Part I

 

The study of the origin of words is

etymology.

It takes a word by its hand and

walks it back to its birth.

 

Don’t confuse it with

entomology,

the study of insects, or

those words

and their ancestors

and their progeny will

fly away to feed on local flowers.

 

Part II

 

I don’t know the etymology of the word

fugue,

but there must have been serious family

infighting and anger and then

final separation for its two definitions to now live

completely different lives.

 

A fugue is a piece of music

shared by that composition’s family,

intertwined, embraced, encouraged by all.

 

A fugue is the absence of

self

Not a sharing in a family,

not even a sharing in one’s own being

A loss of memory so deep that even

a Shostakovich fugue

cannot soothe it back to life.

 

       (September 20, 2020)