Hodgepodge
by Jan D. Hodge
Higgledy-piggledy!
Double dactylics give
rise to a syntax quite
often absurd,
what with that requisite
antepenultimate
line of a single six-
syllable word.
Ponder our ancestor,
Australopithecus:
he’d no idea what
he would become.
Just goes to show that in
antedeluvian
times it already was
smart to be dumb.
Voyeurs and fetishists!
Havelock Ellis’s
frightfully radical
sexual views
on the quintessence of
psychopathology
rattled Victorian
tastes and taboos.
When down at Kitty Hawk
Wilbur and Orville Wright
flew the first airplane, their
fingers were crossed.
They had no doubt of things
aerodynamical;
they were just praying their
bags not be lost.
Johannes Agricola
Glorious misery!
Heavenly Patriarch,
grateful am I that with
Thee will I dwell.
Let me, a meek little
supralapsarian,
show no compassion for
those doomed to hell.
*Cf. Robert Browning’s Johannes Agricola in Meditation
Master of policy,
President Dub-uh-ya
stuck to his guns in his
war on Iraq.
Was it his passion for
counterintelligence
made him heed only his
militant claque?
Oh what a narcissist!
Beauregard Vanity’s
egocentricity’s
dismally grim.
Could he breed simply by
parthenogenesis,
soon all the world would be
swarming with him!
“Send me your dollars,” says
Reverend Grubbalot,
tacitly promising
heaven for sale.
Too bad the cynical
pseudoevangelist,
preying on weakness, won’t
end up in jail.
Self-righteous citizen
CEO megabucks
argues that have-nots will
weaken the breed,
proving his thesis by
axiomatically
paying them basely while
feeding his greed.
Jan D. Hodge grew up in a letterpress print shop in small town Michigan, was educated at the Universities of Michigan (B.A., M.A.) and New Mexico (Ph.D.; dissertation on Dickens), and taught for 32 years at colleges in Illinois and Iowa before retiring. His poems have appeared in North American Review, New Orleans Review, Iambs & Trochees, South Coast Poetry Journal, Western Wind, and elsewhere.
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