On this day (penultimate April) in history, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train arrived in Cleveland OH, following his assassination on 4/14/1865. As described by Tim Evanson on FB today:
Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category
How’s your old wazoo?
April 24, 2026(some vulgar slang, but (I think) tolerable by kids and the sexually modest)
Today’s (4/24) morning name, the final line of a quatrain I learned as boy lore about 1950:
How’s your ma and how’s your pa
And how’s your sister Sue?
And while we’re on the subject,
How’s your old wazoo?
(#1) The family-wazoo rhyme; I didn’t know the quantity adverbial up the wazoo at the time, so I mistakenly took wazoo to be a variant of street slang dick / cock ‘penis’
Stained by poppies
March 30, 2026Going past me yesterday morning, a tv ad for some remedy for, as I heard it, teeth stained by poppies (and other foods).
Yes, coffee. With blueberries, black tea, and red wine, a classic offender against dental whiteness. Granting that I have /a/ (in addition to /ɔ/) as an alternative accented vowel in coffee, poppies is a complex but phonologically unsurprising mishearing; coffee and poppies are in fact excellent half-rhymes / imperfect rhymes:
My morning coffee
By a field of poppies
(with two feature rhymes, both well-attested — (initial) p for k and (medial) p for f — plus a subsequence rhyme, with the final z of poppies against the absence of a final consonant in coffee; for the terminology, see my 1976 Chicago Linguistic Society paper “Well, this rock and roll has got to stop. Junior’s head is hard as a rock.”, available on-line here)
My accomplishment for 2/25
February 27, 2026My signal accomplishment for this day was an hour of singing Sacred Harp hymns along with the wonderful YouTube videos of All-Ireland Sacred Harp conventions of years past. Eventually, I’ll celebrate just one song, SH276 Bridgewater, which is such a favorite that it has on occasion triggered my slipping into a state of ecstasy.
Reptilian fruit couplet
December 24, 2025Accompanying this hazy snapshot posted on Facebook on 12/22 by John Wells —
Juicy scavenging on the green slopes of (I assume) Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands; the fully ripe fruits fall to the ground and ferment there, where the local iguanas can feed on them
— was his caption, the donée for a poem in trochaic tetrameter (with a couple leading unaccented syllables), the most common meter for folk poetry of all kinds in English:
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
Today’s found poetry
December 13, 2025Today on Facebook, Hana Filip passed on a two-sentence poem in prose (an English translation from the German original):
Jan Antonin Baťa, or Bata, the genius entrepreneur who founded the Bata shoe emporium, had in his main headquarters in Zlín (Moravia, Czech Republic), an elevator in the size of a fully equipped office. While sitting in this office, he could move up and down his headquarters building and visit its different departments.
Suck my suffix!
December 6, 2025(thoroughly raunchy Christmas porn, in verse of sorts; not for kids or the sexually modest)
Inspired by the appearance of gay porn actor Dean Young partnered with Joey Mills in Joey’s Surf Vacation (yesterday on this blog), I pulled out DY’s photos from the Christmas sextravaganza Cum All Ye Faithful (in which he’s a very naughty elf), and whipped out a few lines of raunchy verse (with a linguistic subtext for the academically inclined):
Yesterday’s found poetry
November 22, 2025Yesterday, a news story (from an Ohio site) with this summary of its subject, Madelyn Varela:
Ohio’s viral lesbian cheesemonger
This builds in sound from its onset to its cheesemonger climax, which was something of a surprise (just on likelihood, I was expecting goatfarmer); and its content comes across like a series of random pings: Ohio; then a lot of followers (viral here means, roughly ‘widely circulated, with many followers’); then, whoa, a dyke; and, who would have guessed, a seller of cheese (in a word, a cheesemonger). A lovely bit of found poetry.
So, of course, I gilded it.
Tomorrow x 4
November 21, 2025Tomorrow is 11/22; on my calendar this brings up a set of two deeply discordant anniversaries and the birthday of an admirable colleague and friend. And this year 11/22 is the date of Stanford’s preeminent sporting event, to add a note of passionate silliness to the whole business.