The Whole Kit ‘n’ Caboodle

Mississippi and Misterssippi
found a baby
in their breadbox one morning.
Nobody could tell them
how it got there.

Local experts thought
it could have been smuggled in,
but why the breadbox of all places?
Everyone was stumped on that.

He preferred his brains roasted
with a glass of fine vouvray
every evening at seven sharp.
No later, no sooner, or
he wouldn’t know when to eat.
He had an idea, but only that,
at mealtime he needed a bell
to be rung and rung again.
But yesterday Denis (the man
who rings the bell) had to
pick up his kid from the hospital
and abandoned his post.
There were no bells.
The whole meal was ruined.
It was a damn shame.

We landed up on a rising,
no more than fifty feet
from the balcony,
when a galloping rhinoceros
snarled at us,
mad about the redirectioning.

Oh, was he a mean one.

It’s a skinny shame
that our streusel’s stuck
in bed. There’s no chance
of getting it out now,
no jaws of life will suffice.

Every pore of that
Egyptian cotton
is contaminated,
and you’re kidding yourself
if you think your sheets
will ever be the same.

It starts with a whip and a flip.
You can’t miss any of those
scrambled egg connotations,
flung through the kitchen window
onto an innocent bystander’s curly locks.

If you have a notion
to be flip about silky consistency
and yolk dispersal, by all means,
do so on your own time.
There’s a man out there
who’ll need to take a second shower today
because of your negligence.

There have to be
more ways to sink a ship
than by pelting it
with thousands of turtle shells,
but I can’t think of any.

I mean, we can pelt it
with live armadillos
or unripe durians
to achieve a similar effect,
but why are we trying
to sink the ship anyway?

Aren’t there people aboard?
If it was empty, devoid of life,
I’d say go ahead, pelt away.
But you just know there’s a crew
on board, and do they deserve
a pelting? Maybe a few of them,
but it’s unfair to sink the ship
just because of a few bad apples.

Let’s hold off
on collecting those turtle shells,
the turtles will make
better use of them anyway.

Screaming at the rhythm
does a lot of good.
It can tie knots
where none had previously existed,
taking twine to task
and sneaking compliments
under the covers,
where our mothers would never suspect.

So scream at the rhythm
as though you lost a game of chess
against yourself, never once stagnating
or pointing an unruly finger to the sky.

You’re better than that,
you don’t need excuses this morning
or any other time.
You need to split your psyche
into fragments and blink
like nobody’s watching.