More On Upcoming HS Reunions

My friends help me to remember the good stuff and we usually don’t talk about how …

Most of my teen years were spent

Repressing my internal ferment

I was scheming and hoping

And grasping and groping

To find what was really important.

If you could go back, would you then remember what you didn’t know then, but you do know now?

Would I relive my adolescence again?

In reruns do different things happen?

Could I really expect 

To improve or correct

All the dumb moves that I made back then?

What do YOU Expect?

What first comes to your mind when you hear the word limerick?  Nantucket?  Smut? …?  Somehow the typical limerick goes something like this:

A young person from a rhyming locality

Has an attribute or sexual proclivity,

This rare feature leading

To behavior exceeding

The limits of real possibility.

Life, Limericks and the Pursuit of Happiness has been on the market for almost three years now, and I think sales just reached 20 or so, so maybe:

After years it’s time I admitted

I’m disappointed, dejected, discomfited 

My book sales are slow

So now I know

The demand for clean limericks is limited.

My March Madness

Equinox, where are you?

Outside it is 14 degrees

The wind is beating up trees

I googled “Spring”

The web says it’s coming

Can we trust the net’s expertise?

Summoning the optimism a person needs

Last weekend I planted some seeds

60 days on the sill

Only 2 months until

The frost in the soil concedes.

A Poetaster's Dream

I think it is unusual

For a contest to solicit doggerel

None of the entries, I would bet

Are from a future laureate

This time the judge is rootin’

For something far less high falutin.

Today's entry for doggerel in the poetry contest @ www.wordsmith.org/awad.

Send your entry to contest@wordsmith.org

There is Still Time

A Word A Day is running a poetry contest this week and there is still time to enter see:

www.wordsmith.org/awad

and send your entries to  contest@wordsmith.org by FRIDAY - Good Luck

So far this week you can enter (definitions provided on wordsmith) 

1) clerihew

2) epigram

3) cento

4) limerick

5) Friday's form to be determined

So here are my contributions so far:

Clerihew

Mark Twain, né Samuel Clemens

Of modest midwest origins

Transformed himself through wit

Into a Yankee from Connecticut

Epigram

An epigram should sound

Witty, yet be profound.

Cento

The time has come the walrus said

To speak of many things,       

I must go down to the seas again

I know why the caged bird sings

Only thing we have to fear is fear itself

Take these broken wings and learn to fly

Poems are made by fools I fear

Now and then there’s a fool such as I.

Lines 1 & 2:  The Walrus and the Carpenter, Lewis Carroll, 1872

Line 3: Sea Fever, John Masefield, 1913

Line 4: I Know Why the  Caged Bird Sings,  Maya Angelou, 1969

Line 5: Inaugural Address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933

Line 6: Blackbird, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 1976

Line 7: Mad Magazine parody of: Trees, Joyce Kilmer, 1913

Line 8: (Now and Then There's) a Fool Such As I, Bill Trader, 1952

Limerick - from Life Limericks and the Pursuit of Happiness

My advice to poets who are shy

About revealing their soul’s anguished cry

Syntactical convolutions

And abstruse allusions

Can incomprehensibilify.

Science vs Politics

Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, was in England trying to burnish his image and refused to answer a question about his beliefs on evolution

Since Darwin makes Scott Walker leery

In England he sidestepped a query.

Does he have the will

To sponsor a bill

To repeal evolutionary “theory?”

Meanwhile, back in Wisconsin, he tried to eliminate searching for “the truth” from the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement.  After all...

He lives in the Land of the Free

Resists any threat of tyranny

Won’t be subject to whims

Of scientific theorems

That infringe upon his Liberty.