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There was an old man of Khartoum
Who kept a tame sheep in his room,
"To remind me," he said,
"Of someone who’s dead,
But I never can recollect whom."
--W. R. Inge
Hornblower (Anonymous)
A boozing musician named Rock
Just loved to blow jazz on his sock.
In the midst of a riff
One day he got stiff
When he grabbed, not his foot, but his cock!
A Robbery (Anonymous)
Some thieves sacked the home of Miss Hughes
Who owned a remarkable nose.
She cried, "Sirs! I shall sneeze
And alert the police
If you don’t get out of my house!"
There was an old man of Ancona,
Who found a small dog with no owner,
Which he took up and down
All the streets of the town:
That anxious old man of Ancona.
(Edward Lear)
There was a young lady of Ryde
Whose shoestrings were seldom untied.
She purchased some clogs,
And some small spotted dogs,
And frequently walked about Ryde.
(Edward Lear)
Love Equals Swift and Slow (Henry David
Thoreau)
Love equals swift and slow,
And high and low,
Racer and lame,
The hunter and his game.
News Item (Dorothy Parker)
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
With a Detective Story (J. V. Cunningham)
Old friend, you’ll know by this how scholars live:
The scholar is a mere conservative,
A man whose being is in what is not,
The proud tradition and the poisoned plot.
He is bewildered in the things that were,
He thrives on sherry and the murderer,
And with his bottle on a rainy night
By Aristotle’s saws brings crimes to light.
So with this murderer may you make merry
And we’ll redeem him with a glass of sherry.
Grief restrains grief as dams torrential rain,
And time grows fertile with extended pain.
(J. V. Cunningham)
Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,
And naked was my pastime in between.
(J. V. Cunningham)
This Englishwoman (Stevie Smith)
This Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind.
A Politician (ee cummings)
a politician is an arse upon
which everyone has sat except a man
On a Volunteer Singer (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Swans sing before they die—‘twere no bad thing
should certain people die before they sing!
Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she’s at rest—and so am I.
(John Dryden)
Her Whole Life Is an Epigram (William Blake)
Her whole life is an epigram: smack, smooth, and neatly penned,
Platted quite neat to catch applause, with a sliding noose
at the end.
Academic (Theodore Roethke)
The stethoscope tells what everyone fears,
You’re likely to go on living for years
With a nursemaid waddle and a shop girl simper
And the style of your prose growing limper and limper.
Critic (William Jay Smith)
A short-order cook is the mealymouthed critic,
In his chromium kitchen long has he rambled;
Attacks an egg with a little egg beater
And serves is shirred, or blurred, or scrambled.
"Poet" (William Jay Smith)
After, each, word, he, places, a, comma,
A, remarkable, effect, indeed,
It, gives, you, jitters, when, you, look,
It, gives, you, hiccoughs, when, you, read.
Lady Biographer (William Jay Smith)
She devotes her life to the lives of others,
Sees the poor mad poets as they were;
And how they’d have been if they’d had nice mothers,
Or if they all had married her.
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