Chopped up

 _                                  _
|                                    |
  I think that I shall never know
  A tree as lovely as a po-
  em, written by some crazy bod
  And nothing at all to do with God.
|_                                  _|

Out of deference to
The wishes of
Our leadero
The rest of this page will be in free verse
Which isn't just "chopped up prose",
As it has been designated
Because of
The negative spaces.
(Which are all around us
Even as we speak, making
Sure that our speech is writing.)
That's all, fisho.

'Twas in the year of 1992, the month was not July
When I decided to write about Julius Caesar
("The Roman geezer")
Who was much affected thereby.
Though not as much as by Shakespeare — I cannot lie.

1992 — Julius Caesar — dead
Unless memory mistake
{Simple Chinese ideogram}
Unġelaeredon preostas!

Correct answers on a limerick (or a post card if you're Socrates)
    Thank you.

Tekstulineto

Iam estis virin' el Dorseto
Kun multege da libroj sur breto
Oni ofte ŝin mokis
Kaj rezone sufokis
Tamen restis ŝi tekstulineto.

An optimistic Presidento
Wrote limericks in Esperanto
A convenient dodge
Whose obscurity-oj
May not have been quite what he meanto.

There once was a Captain called Haddock
Who lived like a horse in a paddock
Except that he didn't
There's no antecedent
To this limerick which is quite baddock.

Limericks — never again

As I picked up the book this morning
Just as the day was dawning
I noticed a huge array of limericks —
there were well in excess of six.
So I determined there and then
"Limericks — never again."
Their form is too constricting
Not to say debilitating.
And so we must change the form of the text
and give the limericks a rest
lest boredom set in
and madness creep in
And we go about wearing nought but a vest.

Sorry, but...

There once was a beetroot called Muffin
Which was useful for virtually nuffin'
It was sixty years old
And oozing with mould
So they used it to make some tinned stuffin'.

Generous irony

There once was a person sardonic/laconic
Who was often considered moronic,
If one ever protested
At what she'd suggested
She'd reply, "I was being IRONIC!"

    There once was a bucket of soot
    Into which I mistakenly put
    Some inflammable hair
    And a chocolate éclair,
    The result? — well, it blew off my foot.

    One ontological high flier
    Loved the existential quantifier
    And had it existed
    Could not have resisted
    The transcendental signifier.

To the logocentric discourse imperious
Which cannot be taken for serious
One attributes inanity
And sometimes insanity
Ironically — only when generous!

As the sign operates through analogy
And the truth of truth is a tautology
There are no pragmatics
Without problematics
And the future is in grammatology.

    Have a nice day.

Archaeopteryx

There existed a very strange chap
Who created a game with a map,
It was all about fish
And it looked very swish
But it was really a pile of crap.

There once were some folk who wrote limericks
For rhymes they were frequently in a fix
It became such a feat
That I've started to cheat
And am ending this one — archaeopteryx.

There once were some folk who wrote limericks
About intertextual metaphysics
They were over two-thirds
Full of very long words
And they scanned as iambic anapaestics.

There once was a yak in the bath
And an elephant under the path
There were eggs in the trees
With a plate of cream-teas
Oh, this limerick's good for a laugh.

Il n'y a pas d'hors-texte

There once was a person called Liz
Who would get in a terrible tizz
If one slagged off the text
She'd get awfully vexed
For she claimed she's a text — and she is!

There once was a textual vision
Which embodied a loony position
It was not white or black
Or a smelly old yak
But a mere binary opposition.

Horrendously purple monstrosities
Used to spout lots of verbal pomposities,
Though they may have been right
On a Saturday night,
On a Sunday they were useless verbosities.

There once was a chap who was vexed
That writing had thinking annexed
Tho' you may deride it
There's nothing outside it
And therefore "Il n'y a pas d'hors-texte."