The Limerick Squad

"Buffoon?" screeched Professor Karswell, reemerging into the plot from a nasty oily puddle of mulch where he had been squashed when a particularly heavy text (it was the "Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto") had clunked him on the head.

    "Buffoon" squawked Professor Igloo, who was Karswell's antimatter doppelgänger (twice removed with a spanner before inserting cartridge D; do not connect blue wire to green fuse without full insurance first) and expired. (Tax disc, and the.)

    "Where's the fishy?" said Professor Karsill, who had gone potty. He pottered round the potty, going potty, and battered round the batty going batty, it said on the door, please don't spit on the floor, so he stood up and spat on the BANG!!!

    "No one expects the Limerick Squad," shrieked Michael Palin, who was now an hour-and-a-half late. Everyone looked at their watches, but since they were all made of marzipan and fondue, they watched their looks instead (at).

    "Is this yours?" asked the rancid rebellious Palin, seeing the Bowyers' Tinned Steak and Kidney Texty-Pie and picking it up. But it screamed in displeasure and refused not to be replaced on the amazing new ultra-strong in-room personal gravity compensator (the floor). "I wasn't born yesterday!" it squealed. "I was born tomorrow!"

    "Impossible," laughed Professor Karsill.

    "Impothible," said Sylvester.

    "I tought I taw a puddy-tat," squeaked Texty-Pie.

    "3.141592653589794..." squirmed Texty-π.

    "Where's the fishy?" said Professor Karswell, who still hadn't found it (insert innuendo here: __________). But there was too much weather in the boot, and they all died happily ever after, and other things what begins with a Q.

No goat on the moon

There once was a rationalist clot
Who claimed that this book had a plot
What did he expect?
A transparent text?
A referential discourse or what?

(Enough limerwrecks. Ed.) (Who's Ed? Antiplautus)

There once was no goat on the moon,
Who were never (tho' sometimes) quite soon,
He was strangled, they say,
And exploded one day,
Tha silly old beer named Baboon.

Mauve with boredom

"The death agony of the metatext... is interminable."
    (Guess...)

Professor Igloo was interminable too, though he was not a mortal/immortal (mortal/immortal (under erasure (?))) metatext. The green aliens, to pursue another concatenation of signifiers for a moment, had gone mauve with boredom, trying every known method of termination. Finally, they hit upon ("literally") a Bowyers' Tinned Steak and Kidney Pie (note product placement). And they used it, despite Igloo's protestations, in the negative. They then poured off to the factory to load up with a few tons before using them to destroy civilization as we know it.

A flyte of limericks

Exeunt omnes. Dixit dominus. Cui bono?

"Enough clichés; and on with the story text doodle moose. They rowed for 50 days, but then realised that they'd forgotten their binoculars.

There once was a book full of BLA
The title of which was something like Gla
It wasn't much good
But indeed what could
be expected from an ex-Nazi called Derida!!!

Kongritalutions...

There was a young chap who presumed
To versify — quite unillumed
On the subject of "bla(h)"
And went rather too far
Though less misinformed than confused.

There was once a deleterious doctrine called deconstruction
Well known as a fiendish device, a devilish concoction
Just as it was incomprehensible
In equal measure reprehensible,
So that the reaction of most to it was eructation.

There was a young man who wrote limericks
Which tended towards the pathetic
He found it hard to relate
To the textual state
Constrained by phallocentric binary logic.

Four pages later

blew up.

Did it? An apostrophe to the epistolary form — and why not? Will power — that three.

    At just that three (nearly seven, now) a flying milkjug (they don't all use saucers — some of them have mugs) landed and some biggish green inhabitants emerged. "Remember us?" they said, in proto-Indo-European, "we're back. It took a few millenia but — we learned your language. Just to show we're not into cultural imperialism. We merely intend to exterminate you — have a nice day."

    "Not bad, but you haven't quite grasped the idiom," said Professor Igloo. "Unfortunately we speak American now. So had better jolly well beetle off and learn it!"

That was an interjection on behalf of the plot. Now — back in the metatext... wordz-a-poppin. (ah yeah!)

"Anyone who can't spell 'millennia'." (Mr Mad)

Up we shall journey

Up we shall journey, to the wild wastelands of the North
Desperately wondering whether the voyage will be worth
it. And yet as we travel the distance to places afar
Our thoughts will turn to Liz at home, reading Glas.
We hope she will prove able to cope by herself
And that she won't consume anything deleterious to her health.

All that I would say to you is this — mind the text,
Liz, mind the text, lest you have a surfeit of it,
Wherefore we might have, on our return, to inform your next
of kin as to your impending insanity. But what of it —
It will now be apparent that I have difficulty
Making this rhyme ———

but tell me, o Liz, can I be blamed for this?
Is it a crime?

P.S. Don't be too garrulous here in our absence.
& have a good Easter moose.

Elk, eek

    Elk to the left of them, elk to the right of them
    Into the negative space
    Rode the five hundred moose

"Dark in here!" said some of them.

"Mooses in here!" said others.

"Elk!" said the elk.

"Text" wrote the text.

"Texting, texting, 1, 2, 3, texting," said the Moose.

"Eek, a moose!" screamed the early sixties sitcom woman.

{Drawing of a stick woman standing on a table, pointing at a tiny moose on the floor}.