Friday, February 24, 2006

Self-Portrait: The Bastard on a Burning Deck

Rapier-cute.

Button-keen.

Laden with peanut butter and jam,
The salad fork illuminates
The pearly teeth of Our Subject,
The thin lips and deepset eyes set in a rictus of nearly Papal cruelty.

Haughty as a Spanish Don
An even better dresser,
Riches even shameful on
A crooked tax assessor

Fee, fi, fo, fum,
For once the blood of Englishmen
Curdles away like the queen of the May
At his Janus-faced approach.

Who among us, pray, enacts a Walking Palindrome?

A man, a plan, a canal, a couple of bucks for a trusted old pal, a pillowcase stuffed with gravel, a calling card: Have Horse, Will Travel, a saw, a paw, a claw, a mute and blinded black jackdaw, a monkey wrench, Dame Judy Dench, a cobbler's bench, a vaguely louche and morbid stench, a man, a plan, a canal, a man, a canal, a man, a plan, a man, a canal, a plan, a completely different man, a barrelhoop, a phlegmy cough, a stone, a bone, a clone, a groan, something muttered on the phone, a bike, a spike, a pike, a dike, the end of another Thousand-Year Reich, a log, a bog, a long hard slog, a tough-acting enzyme to loosen that clog:

Panama!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I worked on this one a little bit. It seemed like it needed some fabula or sujet, or whichever one of those means bounciness.

Lay down the shovel and the hoe
Hang up the fiddle and the bow
There's no more work for poor old Ned
Because he's d-e-a-d dead
Yakety yak (don't talk back)

roxtar said...

As just an ordinary dude,
I bow to your vocablitude.
I' works a bit with word and letter,
Enough to know I've met my better.

From such a wit each man and madam
Flees (Did you know Adam had 'em?)
My moving finger's often writ,
But looking back, it looks like shit.

I've got a blog, I've got the time,
To hammer out some clever rhyme
But not so much the inspiration,
Dedication, concentration

All the things a writer needs
To put some ginger in his screeds.
Instead my writing's brief and dry,
Documents in which I try

To show a judge with jaundiced eye
The rule of law by which my guy
Or gal should go back on the street.
I try to keep it short and sweet

There's not much call for charm or wit
In motion, pleading, brief and writ.
The judge would frown and shake his head
If I used something Ned had said,

Like "Here's my cunt!" or "Button-keen"
I shudder at the courtroom scene.
"Your writing's snarky, snide and jokey;
Your client's going to the pokey!"

So I come home and pet my dogs,
Kiss my wife and split my logs.
Build a fire, cook some dinner,
Try to sit and write a winner.

As someone said on getting started,
"Tried to shit, but only farted."
And when I feel that I am ready,
I read the latest post from Neddie.

There's irony, anadiplosis,
What a clever guy our host is!
Metaphor and litotes;
How can I compete with these?

Of course, it's not a competition.
In fact, I am in no position
Which would allow me to upstage
The stuff I find on Neddie's page.

I lack the tools, I lack the skill
I lack the time, I lack the will.
So I will close with kind regards,
"Top this, the rest of you fucktards!"

helmut said...

Damn, Roxtar, You might just have outdone Ned himself!

stwyx - pretentious arena band comprised of four-year-olds

roxtar said...

Oh, no. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense...I'm a little man. He's a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across floors of silent seas.

I mean, check out the archives.