Edible Arrangements

 

Our friends are celery and thyme.

They’re acorn squash and coriander.
They used to pass the oddbox rhyme;
They used to copulate, philander,
Sweat out of every pore, and curse.
Now they grow grass, and we grow worse.

Our friends are honey locust; mud
Becomes them. No more shop and dance
With anyone who warms their blood
And shtups the lot in true romance.
Eggplant, maybe, and Queen Anne’s lace.
No one grows with a greater grace.

Yam and bo, they were once a pair,
Love in an atmospheric venue.
R ♥ J on a bark is their
Gnarled and edible hostel, menu,
And home at last, the beetles say,
Leaves in the fall and flags in May.

Word Problems

 

Let's say you had 2 monkeys and a fox,

7 bananas, and an ATV,
Or maybe a rowboat, and a ski chalet.
How many trips before you fall asleep,
Dreaming of Mr Dinkum’s science test
And the atomic weight of Super String?
Give up? One monkey’s grey, the other locked
In Booneville, where he learned the iron rule.
The fox clears out the tikihut and leaves
Scat on the rec room floor in thorns and thetas.
Then you remembered Mr D was dead,
Shot by his wife in 1983
For messing around in Chem Club Lab. The fox
Is wily, and you never stood a chance.

Tales From Sycorax's Wood

 Once split, twice shy, the tree

Will not disclose the plight

Of those condemned to be

Embedded out of sight.

They never speak of her.

Whatever once occurred

To make a prisoner,

No one will say a word.

Only the bark is warm,

In places bark is not,

And when lush Carpo’s storm

Shakes the wood, the lot

Of trees exempts such places,

No motion and no sound,

No sense of human faces,

Except the wetted ground.

Endoscopy

It seems to be a form of divination,

All of the chickens gone, but not at peace,

The parts all fried. We read the gizzards, though.

They seemed to say that all is what it was;

No matter what we do, the end comes last.

The scholars have their doubts. They cast the bones

Upon the waters, looking to get a rise,

Some answers bubbling up, a withered arm,

Trove in a gnarly hand. The argument

Which they propose is, Everything foretold

In great detail and ending in the dark,

The sea worms and the earthworms in the dark,

And no one ever learns what happens next.

Quiet Flows The Don

They hid the old professors in the sub-
Scriptorium, in carrels made of wood
And chickenwire, gave them wi-fi, let
Them roam the stacks, as long as they were late.
They were, they always were. Was found: puns bent
To fit into the pretty bursar's door.
The bursar's gown was torn and gluey, stained;
Her person was a vacancy in time
And apprehension. Dr Rathbone wrote,
The Oxford comma marks the gentleman.
We cannot find a one about her person.
Condemned, he was, for pronomial pride,
Then built a stand behind Collected Works,
Blue and maroon, with peeling paper labels,
Accessible to none and dead to all.