! Funnyossities Poem by Michael Shepherd

Where silliness borders on the realm of possibility –
that’s the blissful land where children play;
inventing for themselves, or helped
by those never-quite-grown-ups
who spend their working week
chortle-gurgle-wham-ouch-eeuucchh! -‘****? ’-
EEEKK! -AAaarrgghh! ! ! ,
illustrating Kidz Komix and such
in that blissful land

and there were books called ‘Funnyossities’
(they’d be nothing now)
the pages chopped laterally in three:
heads in the top section, every possible caricature,
bodies of every size, shape, dress, the middle section;
then legs of all sorts (lots of hairy ones, of course)
occupied the lower section;

and you turned them over, this way, that way,
to make the most ludicrous combinations…
sometimes just absurd, sometimes surreally possible…

I’m there on the page you’re turning now:
a wizened face, eyes popping;
from my mortar-board, it seems, a schoolmaster enraged
to apoplexy and beyond;
the body of a languid, greenery-yellery poet, wilting like
a stick of celery long past its celery-buy date…
the legs like ancient hairy sticks beneath the woeful shorts…

feel free to chortle, or to turn the page;
it could be worse.