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Man! It has been awhile. I really appreciate your looking after the place while I've been gone. Everything looks terrific. Seriously - the chrysanthemums would have been withered shadows of their former selves in my care. Even my goldfish seem perkier. I can't thank you enough.

So take a load off! Make yourself comfortable! I'll make coffee.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

high-brow verses low-brow

or, the poop joke's on me

by the way, here's a tree-death (printable) version

In my old school, there was this guy,

Psychotic twinkle in his eye.

All social functions he refused—

Preferred to keep himself amused,

Spending what free time he had

Composing poems on a pad.

I say composing—well, here's the gist:

He was largely just a plagiarist.

He rewrote classic verses, as a group,

Replacing certain verbs and nouns with "poop."

We called him moronic, childish, daft.

He scribbled away and laughed and laughed.

Sometimes he shared: "What's in a name?

A poop redubbed would smell the same."

Or, "Poopy, poopy, burning bright,

In the toilets of the night,

Who knows what mortal left you here

And thus set fire to his rear?"

Tennyson's ill-fated 600-strong troop

Now bravely rode into the Valley of Poop.

When he and Dickinson got together,

He turned Poop into the Thing with Feathers.

Even Frost took it on the chin

When he chose "the poop less trodden in."

No poetic structure was deemed too stupid--

For Spenser he even pronounced pooped "poopèd."

He worked alphabetically from Auden to Wordsworth

Comically overestimating just what a turd's worth.

The more the verse from his pen trickled,

The more he grew perversely tickled.

He became weirder and more withdrawn.

Neighbors heard cackles from dusk to dawn.

The Poet Laureate of Defecation

Disappeared following our graduation.

Funnily enough, I bumped into him

Homelessly becamped outside my new gym,

Duffel overflowing with his crappy poems

And dog-eared poetic anthology tomes.

Scabby and blotchy and suffering from gout,

Smelling like the stuff his poems were about.

Discussing our lives, I felt superior,

But still, of us two, he was the cheerier.

See, though I have a big house, a wife who's a model,

A Jaguar, a vineyard with my name on the bottle,

And adorable twin girls named Meg and Beulah,

I also have bowels which from birth were not regular.

Thus it was, after all those years, I was jealous,

Because, since writing all those poems he'd tell us,

Though he has never once worked or married or dated,

He has also never once been constipated.

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