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Mumbledy jumbledy,
Susan Lynn Elliott
Lives on a diet of
Chocolate and tea,

Thereby refuting her
Antireductionist
Views on the nature of
People and me.

In the world’s first night the earth lay down.
In the first light it stood again.
Now smoke strides daily above the town
And if a spark strikes, then
Take it as you must
And in a gust of days
Raise a blaze of dust
To a dusty day.

Barnacles bound from the harrowing sound
Of the Bailiwick’s Barnacle Bake.
They run to the sea and they call as they flee,
“We will hide in the great salt lake!”

The guests at the fest had ingested the rest
Of unescaped barnaclekind,
So the Bailiwick’s hands were out searching the lands
To find out the things they could find.

The barnacles looked, but the ocean was cooked
And had run far away from the sands.
They went back to partake of the Barnacle Bake,
Avoiding the Bailiwick’s hands.

The horror crawls in toddlers’ scrawls
And oozes through the pores of lovers;
The dark rot bleeds into desperate needs
That Alzheimer’s undiscovers.
Roll, thunder, roll, boom like the heartstrings failing,
And mumble, mortals, mumble, quailing, quailing, quailing.

We are neoformalists,
Totally monotonous.
We read a book on how to scan
In the prehistoric time,
Programmed our computers and
Checked the answers line by line.
We are so creative, man.
You know because we used a rhyme.
Totally monotonous,
We are neoformalists.

A delicate rhythm befits the informal age.
We thin our iambs with numerous anapests.
No strong stresses must taint the ironic tone.
Oh, and I almost forgot—we write no end-
stopped lines, not without special dis-
pensation. Also—what the hell, forget it!
Everyone thinks it’s free verse anyhow.

I would like to turn everyone’s attention to a writer who, unlike many others, continued to swim after making his splash,
Namely, the lighter-than-water Ogden Nash,
A verse humorist whose primary compositional principle
Is to stubbornly remain the exact opposite of inwincible,
And whose general working method is to mix up long and short lines in a way so maddening and so funny that in the end you have to conclude that he’s a genius or a whiz,
Which he is.
But that’s not the funniest part, the funniest part is when his wife says, Oggie dear, and he says, yes what is it my darlingest pollywoggy,
And she says, Oh, nothing, I just wanted to find out what you would say when I called you Oggie.

tell a tale of ten-pins
catcher in the rye
four and twenty sirens
singing to the sky

when the song is over
the sky begins to fall
and down comes chicken little
vigilance and all

Be not the first by whom the new is tried:

A. Wait until it’s fully cut-and-dried.
B. Hold off till you’re sure that no one died.
C. But claim you were and write the field guide.
D. We can all try at once and not collide.

le xuncutcpi su’o slaka
fo le spidja canai pleji
.i gauku fi le tego’i cmene
lei rijno ze’u vreji