I am a horse, a patient, plodding hack harnessed behind a chromed cart — a cart I push when told to go and stop when told to whoa.

The Minister Speaks: “Our chastened knees and pressed p… Father and Son, you said, were co… the water to wine, the stinking co… mere legerdemain, you claimed,

Verse now slain by latest dogma, down the cobbled street come mourn… trundling Verse’s coffin forward, charging all to note the corpus, garroted for disregarding

The Domestic Life of the Elephan… Elephants, Lawrence wrote,** let love bloom slowly “in their vast shy hearts.” But Lawrence dreamed.

The Bumblebee A tubby, grumbling matron, Concerned alone with duty, Fusses among the roses, Oblivious to beauty.

My wife not being speculative, I requested her philosophy, what her thoughts on life and deat… and, while she put away a pan, she… well, I’ll just bumble around unt…

The Jacaranda in Spring (Near Rhyme) What discount art inspired this ta… Eleven months a year you’re quite… Too dark and gaunt, we thought, to…

Boundaries Tracing writhing streams, circling alpine wastes, tickling out a finger nudged between two behemoths,

Guidebook for Immigrants Part I. Making Your Vocabulary… “On sale!” “Reduced!” and “Absolu… Are usually milder forms of larcen… “Adult” means “dirty films” and g…

I hate Shaw with his absurd postu… who want to get in his pants to ca… I hate Henry James for writing se… it takes a cryptologist to figure… I hate Hemingway for his drunken…

His Hobby Our Mr. Hughes, retired, was exce… At working wood, and every Yule h… A creche —cut plywood forms to rep… The cast, especially Jesus, whom…

Constructing a Cathedral: St. Etienne, France, 1350 A.D. Arms and legs a jumble of moving s… the workers swarm like flies aroun… hardly heeding screams of those wh…

Poetry Editors To Poets Don’t send us dull pentameters; That stuff’s for Keats and other… Submit no rhyme, but heaven knows We hate a poem that sounds like pr…

,The Honky-Poet Blues (With apologies to Bessie Smith) I’m sittin’ at my keyboard almos’… I say, I’m sittin’ at my keyboard… The wife want rent money,

(George Meredith advised Thomas Hardy to fill his novels with bizarre and exciting people and events. Subsequently, Hardy in an early novel had a person following a person following a ...