From: Jandhodge@aol.com
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 20:32:58 EST
Subject: Re: dactyls

First a few singles:


Ponder our ancestor,
Australopithecus:
he'd no idea what
he would become.
Maybe that proves that in
antediluvian
times it already was
smart to be dumb.


Higgledy-piggledy,
Jesus of Nazareth,
told of the plan for the
saving of man,
surveyed the world with a
teleological
sigh and said: "Father, I'll
do what I can."


Tra-la-la, sha-na-Na-
polean Bonaparte
set out to conquer the
world in a snit.
When his intemperate 
megalomania
met up with Wellington,
Nappy caught shit.



And a few satirical portraits:

Hollywood cover girl
Starlet O'Plasticene
turned to a surgeon to
boost her appeal.
Now she's a knockout and
oxymoronically
begs for a chance to have
parts that are real.


Oh what a narcissist!
Beauregard Vanity's
egocentricity's
dauntingly 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 his cynical 
inauthenticity,
leeching on weakness, won't
land him in jail.


       Prayer*

Glorious misery!
Heavenly Patriarch,
grateful am I that with
Thee will I dwell.
May I, a meek little
supralapsarian,
show no compassion for
those doomed to hell.

*Cf. e.g. Browning's "Johannes Agricola in Meditation"



Note: for the following extended double-dactyl narratives I waived the
rule that the second line must always be a proper name.

SHAKESPEARE DOUBLE-DACTYLED

Romeo and Juliet

Saddest of tragedies--
Juliet Capulet
tumbles in love with fair
Romeo's grace,
but to her sorrow an
irreconcilable
quarrel denies her her
lover's embrace.

Troublesome circumstance--
Romeo Montague,
killing her kinsman in
combat of arms,
finds himself subject to
prosecutorial
fervor and flees from his 
Juliet's charms.

Frantic and woebegone,
Romeo's Juliet
hopelessly hoping her
lover to keep,
gets from her chaplain a
pharmacological
wonder that brings on a
death-aping sleep.

Rushing to be with her,
Juliet's Romeo
swallows a poison, be-
lieving her dead.
Waking, she--pitiful
epithalamion!--
joins him in death on that
sorrowful bed.


Richard III

Last of the Yorkist line,
Richard Plantagenet
climbed to the throne on a
mountain of dead.
Humpbacked, he plotted with
Machiavellian
gusto; his motto was
"Off with his head!"

Tewksbury witnessed his
slaughter of Edward, whose
widow thereafter he
took to his bed.
Anyone faulting such
insensitivity
should have known better; 'twas
"Off with his head!"

He had his brother and 
then his two nephews all
killed in the Tower, or
so it is said.
Hastings and Stanley, who
ideologically
balked at his crowning, heard
"Off with his head!"

All the queen's kinsmen and
then his 'friend' Buckingham
felt his keen edge as the
treachery spread--
prodigal intra- and
extrafamilial
killings to encores of 
"Off with his head!"

Finally England would
brook no more tyranny.
Faced with rebellion, to
Bosworth he fled,
where to his horror he
incomprehensibly
lacked for a horse, and it
cost him his head!

Students of Clio* may
raise their objections to
such a vile portrait as
false and absurd.
We simply shrug at the
historiographers, 
eagerly taking the
Bard at his word.

*the Muse of History


[I've also done King Lear and Midsummer Night's Dream, but enough is enough.  
So on to the promised Jack Sprat and Peter, Peter.  The first was written in 
response to a challenge to use the words "tepid," "gravy," or "flout" in a 
double dactyl.]


Food for the ill-suited
Mr. and Mrs. Sprat
(Jack and Amanda) was
always a strain,
even before a marked
irascibility--
tepid, then virulent--
turned it to pain.

First it was minor things:
ice cream or sherbet, or
whether the tea should be
honeyed or not.
Jack had a palate for 
oleomargarine;
Mandy insisted on
butter, bei Gott!

Things became ugly when
Jack rather nastily
sugared the gravyboat
merely to flout
Mandy (who suffered from
hyperglycemia);
she creamed his veggies to
trigger his gout.

Curious spectacle,
watching such enmity
eat at these creatures at
every repast;
hardly a shock when the
gastrointestinal
warfare dissevered the
twosome at last.

____


Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater

Pitiful, pitiful!
Peter of Petersham
(He who ate nothing but
pumpkins, you ask?)
faced a bewildering
incapability:
keeping his wife, an im-
possible task.

Driven to desperate
measures, he finally
built her a house from the
shell of a gourd.
Though many questioned its 
unsuitability,
it was the best that poor
Pete could afford.

Rather embarrassed by
this strange predicament,
Pete kept his chin up and 
swallowed his pride.
Turned out he'd worried quite
unnecessarily;
happiness bloomed once they
settled inside.

[And then there is Mary and her little lamb.  But that's a long story . . . ]

Cheers,
Jan