All are my own, jotted down over the years.
With a shortfall of talent, and I’m sure it appears.
But rhymes that spring up, though truly not art,
tend to rattle around, and just won’t depart.
So I’ll inflict them on BC, and anticipate your tears.
If for a competition a limerick you must write and then send,
There’s a trick to beat block that I can commend.
Or if writing some words to command a fair wage,
One word at a time you place down on the page,
And when you’ve enough conclude with THE END.
A triplet of linked limericks. Or should that be a couplet and a half?
I eat mung bean sprouts and swedes and asparagus tips,
Carrots and apples and grapes I consume with the pips.
Cabbage and turnip and mooli and all kinds of fruits,
With sliced water chestnuts and tinned bamboo shoots,
But no god damned parsnip is going to get past my lips
Sorry about that one. It well and truly got away from me.
I really don’t like them at all, as I’m sure you can see.
I’d rather eat strychnine along with the rats,
And swallow live mice, produced by the cats.
To my palate a parsnip’s as toxic as unripe ackee,
And saltfish far better is threwn back in the sea.
I know, I know, but I’m sure you have to agree
once on a roll, just write with the flow.
Dump the limerick form, and just go
where the pen takes you. Your muse is the key.
The plural of mouse is known to be mice,
But what on earth I ask is a singular dice?
It’s surely not right to talk of throwing a douse.
And if bottles of spice make ginger a spouse,
Do our families and spice inhabit our hice?
As a boy he’d pull her hair and she’d cry,
In their teens on her that boy he would spy,
Marriage at thirty he thought was the end,
At fifty they’d become each other’s best friend,
Now at turned seventy they just let it go by.
An Usbecki who came from Tashkent,
Wrote limericks decidedly bent,
They twisted and turned,
Like the loops of a worm,
Till inspiration was utterly spent.
An author, not Ell, nor Gee, nor Bee, nor yet Tee,
so I’m thinking a writer and Plus I surely must be.
Joy tempered with hurt and worse in good measure,
all woven in tales, eased pain and cherished the treasure
I found in being able to still laugh at me.
