A Quizzical Verse:
Limericks Comic and Not
Michael
R. Collings
Published by Michael R. Collings at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Michael R. Collings
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Other titles by Michael R. Collings
at Smashwords.com:
Tissue Promises: 151 Haiku at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24475
Going on a Picnic: Poetry Especially for Children at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/25752
Cover: The “Rainbow Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I, artist unknown, c. 1600.
Image in public domain.
[Sunglasses and moustache additional.]
Introduction: Limericks on Limericks
Novelists, Poets and Other Oddities
On the Vagaries of Spelling and Pronunciation
Other books by Michael R. Collings
Introduction: Limericks on Limericks
1.
To limericks I am addicted
(Others, more cruel, say afflicted)--
Though my meter may bobble,
My rhyme schemes may wobble,
My passion can’t be contradicted.
2.
A limerick’s a blind fit of rhyme;
It will hinder you, time after time
From imagery dense
Or pretense of sense--
But when it clicks, it is simply divine.
3.
A limerick’s a quizzical verse
To thought and to reason averse;
But it marches its meter
By gallon or liter
Till the rhythm is finally dispersed.
4.
The limerick’s base rhythm is set--
It’s bouncy as bouncy can get:
It’s unstressed, unstressed,
Then a stressed beat works best,
With the speed of an uncontrolled jet.
5.
A limerick its syntax may strain,
Rhythms or rhyme-words to gain--
Whatever its ploy
It dare not be coy
Lest humor, lest interest should wane.
6.
A limerick’s permitted to slide
O’er some syllables (known as “elide”);
If it’s unstressed and faint
It’s as if it just ain’t,
And you’ll master the beastie with pride.
7.
Some claim limericks have to be dirty,
Explicit, and more than just flirty--
It must hover on shame
To merit the name,
Eschewing all pretense to ‘purty.’
8.
But the ones that you’ll read here are clean,
Or mostly (as soon to be seen)—
They play games with sounds
Often bursting their bounds,
And none are supposed to be mean.
Everyday
9.
Kit’s Grandpa has whiskers like bristles,
Quite often as spiky as thistles,
But she shows them no fear
When she tugs his ear near,
‘Cause her Grandpa has ears that can whistle.
10.
A granny discovered a way
To keep her vile temper at bay:
“‘Tis plain as a book…
I just take up my hook
When I’m crotchety--then I crochet.
11.
Young Kay took her kids on vacation
As a kind of career-expiation;
With a week in a tent
All their tempers were bent--
Driving home the kids rudely played “Kay-shun.”
12.
A wretched old gent with a goiter
Was told by a City Park quoiter,
“Instead of aesthetic
You’re merely pathetic,
And forbidden by statute to loiter.”
13.
A Bridegroom reluctant to Coo
Or to Bill, nonetheless claimed but few
Reservations when asked
If he welcomed the task--
And spoke right out loud, “Yes I do!”
14.
A Warden to rehab averse,
And for punishment strongly a-thirst,
Kept his inmates from writing
All rhyming inditing,
Because he opposed such con verse.
15.
A self-server peddling beatitude
Allowed for the widest of latitude;
He claimed Virtue’s at most
But a lingering ghost,
And Sins just mistakes with an attitude.
16.
A young cowboy straight from Montana
Exclaimed when he saw a banana,
“What a comical fellah,
All curving and yellah--
But it tastes like all-glory-hosanna!”
17.
A woman from old Tallahassee
Possessed what young studs call a chassis;
She paid what was due
To be trained in kung fu
And protected from who’d maul a lassie.
Higher Education
18.
A freshman thought math class a bummer;
At adding, he proved even dumber--
In the fall, he felt doomed,
But by spring, he had bloomed,
And come June, he’d emerged quite a summer.
19.
A college prof quite autocratical
Considered it axiomatical
That a student who’d cheat
Should be shorn of his seat
And released to the wolves bureaucratical.
Mad Science
20.
A scientist brave of the she-sex
Championed cloning in spite of its defects--
Now her epitaph claims
“There are no known remains
Of this morsel of lunch for the T. rex.”
21.
An element christened Plutonium,
Disinclined to engage in harmonium,
But discovered at last
How to have a real blast,
And wedded instead Pandemonium.
22.
A chemist with deficit cranium
Once fed all his houseplants uranium--
“I’ve sure solved my plight;
Now to find home at night,
I just look for the glowing geranium.”
Oh, You Animal!
23.
A lecherous blood-sucker once said--
As he pinioned poor maid to the bed:
“Though you scream and turn pale,
It will nothing avail--
When I bed you, I bed ‘til you’re dead.”
24.
A pet snake twice warned not to gadder