Just Along for the Ride

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A bumpy junket through the versed of world history
by Richard D. Hacken

(All rites reversed)

Chronological Table of Context:

JUST ALONG FOR THE RIDE
FEELING CREATIVE THIS PARTICULAR EON?
THAT'S THE WAY THE TYRANNOSAURUS WRECKS
WE'VE ALREADY BEEN DRIVEN OUT, THANKS
YOU'RE SUCH A CAVE MAN!
OKAY, SO WHO'S IN CHARGE OF THE UNICORNS?
MRS. LOT, YOU NEED TO LIMIT YOUR SODIUM INTAKE...
DYING TO SEE THE PYRAMIDS
LET MY PEOPLE BOOGIE!
I DON'T NEED THIS FORTUNE COOKIE
WHO TOLD THE FOX THAT THE GRAPES WERE SOUR?
MY LOVE FOR YOU IS MERELY PLATONIC
WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT ALEX?
GREEK TO ME
CLEO, WOULD YOU ENTERTAIN THE TROOPS?
SO MARY, WHEN'S THE NEXT FAMILY REUNION?
STARTING A BRAND-NEW RELIGION
WHAT SHALL WE CALL YOUR SALAD, MR. CAESAR?
HAVE A NICE DAY, ST. PATRICK!
ISN'T IT TIME FOR SOME MUSIC, POPE GREG?
SURE, HUN, I'LL GET OUT OF YOUR WAY!
IS TODAY A GOOD DAY TO START A JIHAD?
WHO THOUGHT UP YOUR NAME, CHARLEMAGE?
SAY, ISN'T PERSIA SOMEWHERE NEAR IRAN?
WHY DOES THIS BATTLE HAVE TO BE SO HASTY?
ON, DANTE...
THE FRENCH FOREIGN LESION
SO GEOFF, WHAT'S NEW IN CANTERBURY?
SAID JOAN TO THE EXECUTIONER: WELL DONE!
SAY MARCO, CARE FOR A GAME OF POLO?
ONCE UPON A RENAISSANCE
NEW WORLDS DON'T COME CHEAP!
IS YOUR BROTHER'S NAME "SOUTH AMERIGO?"
DR. LUTHER SAYS I SHOULD DO WHAT WITH MY TIARA?
ALL I WANT IS MY RIGHTFUL POT OF GOLD
HENRY, THERE ARE LESS BLOODY WAYS TO GET AROUND ALIMONY!
SIR THOMAS, TELL US MORE!
MAY WE NAME VIRGINIA AFTER YOU?
THE QUIXOTIC AND THE DEAD
PLEASE PASS THE THUMBSCREWS!
STRATFORD UPON AVON CALLING
PAGING MR.MILTON...
WHO PUT THIS CHIAROSCURO ON MY WALL?
WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THIS FIG, MR. NEWTON?
IF THE MUSIC AIN'T BAROQUE, FIX IT!
FODDER OF HIS COUNTRY
THE WOLFGANG IS AT THE DOOR
EXCUSE ME, MA'AM, WOULD YOU PLEASE REMOVE YOUR HEAD?
IS MOTHER RUSSIA'S FIRST NAME "CATHY?"
WHY IS YOUR BOAT SO STEAMED UP?
A PHENOMENOLOGY OF GRIND
DID WILLIAM KNOW WHAT A WORD'S WORTH?
YOU'LL HAVE TO CLAP LOUDER -- THE COMPOSER IS GOING DEAF
AN AVOGADRO SALAD
WHAT'S THE MATTER, NAPPY, ARE YOUR FINGERS COLD?
EXCUSE ME, DON'T YOU BELONG BACK IN IBERIA?
SO WHAT IF YOU COMMAND THE POWERS OF DARKNESS?
ADIOS TO THE WILD FRONTIER!
VICKIE, CAN ALBERT COME OUT AND PLAY?
WHEN IT CAME TO SEWING MACHINES, ELIAS KNEW HOWE.
NO THANKS, I COULDN'T HAVE A BITE MORE!
"BRING 'EM YOUNG," SAID BRIGHAM YOUNG...
IS ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING IN THE SUN?
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE WAS NO SLAVE TO FASHION...
HERE COME THE CENSORS, GUSTAVE...
MY THOUGHTS ON THIS ARE STILL EVOLVING
BUT KARL, I DO LIKE THE PROLETARIAN WAY YOU'VE TRIMMED YOUR BEARD
CARE TO JOIN US IN A CONGO LINE?
WHO'S THAT LURKING IN THE CURTAINS?
MA BELL FED ALEXANDER GRAHAM CRACKERS.
LIEUTENANT, HOW DO YOU PRONOUNCE "SIOUX?"
NOBODY COULD EVER CON EDISON!
MARY BAKER GOT CAUGHT IN A SPIRITUAL EDDY.
NOW WHO'S DEAD, FRED?
WHERE DID CARRIE NATION INTEND TO CARRY THE NATION?
PARDON ME, SIGMUND, YOUR SLIP IS SHOWING!
YOU'RE CLEARED FOR TAKE-OFF, ORVILLE!
WHO DUG THIS TRENCH IN FLANDERS FIELD?
PANCHO, LET'S RAID THE GRINGO'S VILLA!
MAY I RECOMMEND THIS MANURE ENTITLED "BOLSHEVIK?"
MR. LINDBERGH, CARE TO FAVOR US WITH A SOLO?
MR. CAPONE, YOU'RE SUCH A CIVIC-MINDED GUY!
GRAPES OF WRATH MAKE FOR SOUR WINE
WHY IS MRS. EINSTEIN SHAKING HER WATCH?
WHO'S BEEN MESSING WITH MY FUEL GAUGE?
YUKIKO, SHALL WE VISIT PEARL HARBOR?
ENRICO, I DON'T KNOW YOU FROM ATOM!
THIS IS JUST DESSERT, MR. "ZEKE HYLE"
JOE, IT'S A COLLECTIVE CALL FROM THE UKRAINE!
MR. BURBANK ALWAYS COUNTS TO TREE...
SORRY, I REFUSE TO WEAR BRITISH TOGS
YOU DON'T HAVE TO ANTHROPOLOGIZE TO ME, MARGARET!
WHY DO I GET NAUSEOUS JUST THINKING OF LIFE?
LOOK WHAT YOU HOUND DOG JUST DID TO MY BLUE SUEDE SHOES!
NORMA JEAN, DID YOUR SYMBOL JUST CRASH?
WORDS OF FROST WARM MY HEART...
"ICH BIN EIN IN-BETWEENER!"
MAO-TSE, BITE YOUR TUNG!
NOW WHO HAS THE DREAM?
MOON OVER MY NASA
GIVE HER LIBERTY, OR GIVE HER REST
YES, BUT NEUROTICISM SELLS MOVIE TICKETS
NOT JUST JUSTICE -- SUPREME JUSTICE!
THEY ALSO SERB WHO ONLY DECIMATE
THE LEGACY LIVES?
BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE
STILL JUST ALONG FOR THE RIDE

JUST ALONG FOR THE RIDE
The richness of life's meaning
Transcends even... spring cleaning:
It encompasses the lifetime fun
Of six or seven dozen trips around the sun.
(How rewarding that all life styles
Count toward frequent-flyer miles!)
Up to -- and even after -- we've died,
We're (all of us) just along for the ride.
So swallow your cosmic dramamine
And hold on tight...
While we review the comic scene
Of our extended planetary flight.

FEELING CREATIVE THIS PARTICULAR EON?
Creation was rough and surly,
A sort of primal twang
That reverberated early
Throughout the whole Big (she-)Bang.
Black holes deformed the universe
When some Greek goddess dropped her purse,
Then we were formed from lumps of clay
(Which helps explain the way I feel today).
Slowly from the sea,
From energizing storms and gales,
You and me,
We came ashore
And dropped our tadpole tails
In order to evolve some more.
We've grown from simple cells that fester
To beings that wear pants of polyester...
From a simple acid named "amino"
We've come to sit at slot machines in Reno.

THAT'S THE WAY THE TYRANNOSAURUS WRECKS
In the era Triassic
Dinosaurs were monastic,
Rooting about
With their snouts
And squinting through pits of tar
At the stars.
In the era Jurassic,
Dinosaurs were bombastic,
Nibbling a leaf
Or sinking their teeth
With a crunch
Into each other for lunch.
In the era Cretaceous,
The reptile god was not gracious,
And the dinosaurs had to die.
One of them blinked...
Then they were extinct.
We don't know why.
If birds are the dinosaurs' descendants,
I harbor some resentments
For the way they take to prehistoric flight
And stain my sidewalk guano-white.

WE'VE ALREADY BEEN DRIVEN OUT, THANKS
East out of Eden, Adam and Eve
Suddenly had to leave,
'Cuz there was no pardon
For what they had eaten in the garden.
(It seems that God had been watching from His chapel
When they bit into that apple...)
Although it was a Fall
Involving low cholesterol,
It became clear when they munched
On the fruit that had been bunched
Upon that tree (within God's sight)
That this was a clear-cut case of sinful overbite.
With Devil as ill-wisher on the sidelines,
Adam and Eve had no nutritional guidelines...
When they ate from that tree of knowledge,
Perhaps they thought it would lead to college
Rather than as a portal
To sins that are mortal.
After being blamed
For eating those fat-free fruits
-- And unable to deny it --
Adam and Eve were ashamed
Of their birthday suits
And of the Red Delicious that ruined their diet.

YOU'RE SUCH A CAVE MAN!
Oog MacFroog was having quite a ball
Socializing at Neanderthal,
Dating shapely cave girls who, demure,
Had at least a four-foot long coiffure.
With such, he'd drag the streets in dusty leisure,
Or spend his time at other sorts of pleasure.
With his Stone-Age chromosomes
Oog developed the sciences
And crafted crude appliances
For prehistoric homes:
Within his darkened condo cave
(The largest on his block),
He scraped a rock
Across his face to shave...
And then in his simplicity
He discovered static electricity
By touching amber which he'd saved...
Yes, Oog's meat was the first to be microwaved.

OKAY, SO WHO'S IN CHARGE OF THE UNICORNS?
The sins of mankind grew as rotten
As weevils in a boll of cotton.
Whereupon The Almighty, His anger seething,
Tested mankind's deep-sea breathing
And found that bad guys curb their tongues
When water has filled up their lungs.
Noah, wise to the Wash Day From Sin,
Had taken all the animals in
And had arked across the many waters
With all those animal sons and daughters,
With all those chiquitas and chiquitos
(But it's too bad he saved those two mosquitos).

MRS. LOT, YOU NEED TO LIMIT YOUR SODIUM INTAKE...
Oh, did you hear Gomorrah's
Male contralto chorus
As they hit the G
Above High C
In the grief
Of disbelief
On the occasion
Of their annihilation?
All Sodomites
Definitely deduced
That their breathing rights
Would be imminently reduced.
Yes, Sodom
Hit bottom.
Off to one side, righteous Lot,
In a speech calm and well-reasoned,
Told his wife not to look back, but she got
Curious and then well-seasoned.
Lot gave a tweak
To his wife's right cheek.
It crumbled in a pile
Which he poured into a vial,
Saying: "It's not my fault
She turned to salt."
Lot savored
His flavored
Wife and implored
Of his Heavenly Sustainer:
"Will she be all right if I keep her stored
In an air-tight container?"

DYING TO SEE THE PYRAMIDS
The sun gets very hot
At a certain spot
In Egypt, by the Nile,
Where the Pharaoh forced the rank and file
To sweat
And groan
To get
A stone
Pyramid made.
Pyramids don't give very much shade
(Neither do most palm trees),
But shade was hardly the point,
Since only dead Pharaohs and their Mummsies
Were going to occupy the joint.

LET MY PEOPLE BOOGIE!
Crossing the Red Sea, Moses
Saw no roses.
Nor did he set up camp;
The ground was too damp.
But at a later desert dwelling,
The middle managers and staff
Began kvelling
Over their handsome golden calf.
Meanwhile, from the dried-up slopes of Sinai
Moses brought down Ten Commandments from On High...
It took his women and his men
Several hours to transgress all ten.
Whenever not kvetching
About water they had no hopes of fetching,
The Children of Israel
Kept shmeicheling Moses for a meal
Of fruit salad (especially banana),
Lightly sprinkled with manna.
They were looking to inhabitate
A Land of Milk and Honey,
But wouldn't real estate
Like that be much too runny?

I DON'T NEED THIS FORTUNE COOKIE...
Taoists may wow us,
And Buddhists may woo us,
But nobody can confuse us
If we hearken to Confucius.
Born in the feudal state of Lu,
Confucius knew
(And told everyone he met)
That ritual and etiquette
Are smart for us...
But not as smart as human-heartedness.
"What's cool,"
Confucius say, "Is Golden Rule."
Confucius' teachings were finest among
The Dynasty of Sung,
And were a meditative thing
For the Age of Ming.
Because of these teachings, happy people sang
During the T'ang.
(T'ang, if you think as astronauts think,
Is a powdered orange breakfast drink.)

WHO TOLD THE FOX THAT THE GRAPES WERE SOUR?
In Ancient Greece,
Aesop wrote fables
Without cease,
Giving animals labels
(Like "good" and "bad" or "fast" and "slow")
In order to show
Animal traits that humans share.
For instance, of the tortoise and the hare,
It was the "slower" one who gained the glory.
The moral of that story
(Of which we are to be aware)
Is that the "slow" and "steady"
Set the winning pace.
But wait a minute!
Should the "slow" ones win it?
The way modern logic is leaning,
Fables lose all meaning:
Nowadays the "fast" and "steady"
Win the race.
They then sit down to dinners
To commemorate the winners,
Consisting of: "12-Step-Support-Group
Turtle Soup"
And "Quick-Like-A-Bunny, Fast-As-A-Zephyr
Hasenpfeffer."

MY LOVE FOR YOU IS MERELY PLATONIC...
Plato was one of those wise guys
Who philosophize.
Plato was a pupil of Socrates,
Who taught with dramatic ease...
And who used to try to jog
While carrying on Socratic dialogue.
The student Plato most liked to coddle
Was Aristotle,
Whose own most astute observation
Was that the earth is at the center of creation.
Thus Aristotle's mentor was the ironic Platonic,
And Plato's mentor was the dogmatic Socratic,
Whose teachings went against the local norm.
The point is: poisons in their lethal form
In early Greece
Were not for lease
(Not even to Socrates, Plato or Aristotle)
In an apothecary bottle.
So Socrates, when his time was up,
Had to drink his hemlock from a cup.
If he drank it all the way to the bottom,
It must have been the dregs that got him.

WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT ALEX?
Early on,
Alexander of Macedon
Was tutored by Aristotle
And developed a management model.
Thus, he made a decision
That he favored Pan-Hellenism,
As long as HE was the one in charge.
He made his army large
And took first place
By beating the tar out of Thrace,
By sending every Illyrian
Into delirium,
And then by sacking Thebes
(For which today nobody grieves).
But wanting an even bigger backyard, you see,
Alexander kept practicing "diplomacy."
"Diplomacy" is just another word for extortion,
When you yourself have a greater proportion
Of soldiers and weapons for making incursions
Than do the Persians.
Alexander ruled the world from ocean to ocean
And carved his name in large italics:
You kind of get the notion
That this was one smart Alex.

GREEK TO ME
Outside the Trojan gate, they say,
-- The gate that faces south --
Stood a wooden horse one day.
But no one looked that gift horse in the mouth.
(Why should the kith and kin have been that logical
If everyone was mythological?)
The Trojan horse had been infested
Inside its beams of wood
For weeks
With young Greeks,
So Troy was divested
Of its teeming goods
By means of this hostile takeover.
Meanwhile, Helen of Troy
Acted coy
And had a cosmetic makeover.
This myth is symbolic of rot in the midst
Of a house with termites built in...
Or of how a country hits the skids
When corruption comes from within.
The glory that was Greece's
Slowly fell to pieces.

CLEO, WOULD YOU ENTERTAIN THE TROOPS?
Caesar, once he slipped
Into Egypt,
Wanted to have Cleopatra, the queen,
Whom he had seen
Thricely.
So Julius spake: "I shall seize her
And try to please her.
If she should please me too,
Well, that would do
Nicely.
A bit later,
Cleopatra, dressed in high style,
In skins of alligator
From the Nile,
Asked Marc Antony:
"Do you fancy me?,"
To which he replied, "Yeah, so far!,"
As they retired to her boudoir.
One day, Cleo's throat had a rasp:
The only cough elixir
That could truly fix her
Was the venom from an asp.

SO MARY, WHEN'S THE NEXT FAMILY REUNION?
St. Mary
Was very
Pure.
Some are sure
She conceived the Ultimate Rex
Without the requisite sex.

STARTING A BRAND-NEW RELIGION
Upon a Mount, Jesus sermonized
And fed five thousand people loaves and fishes --
It was a miracle, everybody realized,
Because nobody had to wash the dishes.
Jesus healed the dead with ease,
But came down hard on Pharisees
And other local bureaucrats.
He never would read the Book of Acts
Or his apostles' epistles,
But wore a crown of thistles.
Pontius Pilate was the local Roman boss
While Israel kept its eye out for a savior;
But Jesus made some people cross...
So they returned the favor.

WHAT SHALL WE CALL YOUR SALAD, MR. CAESAR?
Julius Caesar
Was not an appeaser,
And even though Brutus
Was the crudest,
The majority of the senate arrived
At the idea: Caesar should get knived.
Even Augustus
Would disgust us.
Ah, if only you saw
How he resembled Caligula.
I don't know which emperor was bloodiest...
Perhaps it was Claudius.
But the one with the biggest middle
(The one with the largest gut
And the widest butt)
Was Nero, who played his fiddle
As Rome burned
And the fires crackled.
Perhaps the fall of Rome was earned...
At any rate, its facade could not be respackled.

HAVE A NICE DAY, ST. PATRICK!
St. Patrick was a friar-man,
A much admired man
In Ireland.
He instituted Christian wakes
And rooted out the hissing snakes.
One day, St. Patrick expired and
His salvation was acquired and
He joined the heavenly choir and
On the emerald isle of Ireland
Eventually,
In the 20th century,
St. Patrick's mission backfired and:
Ulster was given to a British prince,
And there's been a lot of Ire ever since.

ISN'T IT TIME FOR SOME MUSIC, POPE GREG?
After Gregory came to be Pope
(As announced by a puff of white smoke),
He always would cope
With his problems by telling a joke.
This was fun for the masses
(And fun for the people --
Those lower and still lower classes
Who were building St. Peter's cathedral).
"How many monks," he would ask,
"Does it take to light votive candles?,"
Then after the punchline, His Worship would bask
In the laughter and scoff at the scandals.
But in later years,
When his girth had increased round the middle,
Pope Gregory shifted his gears
From the joke to Gregorian riddle:
"Now if 'oct' in the Vulgate means eight,
Tell me, why does October come late,
The tenth month of most every year?
I cannot for now volunteer
The right answer (which might just involve the occult),
But... here's a Gregorian calendar you could consult.
After each summer came fall
And with it his favorite riddle of all:
"Which red bird flies south next season
And warbles the prettiest tunes without reason?
The question is tougher than barnacles,
And if you would ask me to answer it... I really can't.
But I will go ask all my cardinals
To sing a Gregorian chant."

SURE, HUN, I'LL GET OUT OF YOUR WAY!
From east across the steppes
The Huns with their nasty reps
Came zooming,
Looking for a continent worth dooming:
On they galloped, onward on their courses
(Some of them were even riding horses).
Yes, Hun Attila had a lot of fun
Extorting things from people on the run --
For whom was it he allocated funds?
You know for whom it was,
Because
It was for they themselves, the Huns.
Sure, there was competition from the Vandals,
But to Attila they could hold no candles.
Mere peasants and their gold were quickly spent
Until he left the scene of the Occident.

IS TODAY A GOOD DAY TO START A JIHAD?
The prophet Mohammed was full
Of what people call "most indomitable".
He was forced to follow
His clear call from Allah
With strictest adherence to principle.
His movement now seems invincible.
Today, most Islamic gentlemen and ladies
Never hesitate to take their Mercedes
Out of its blessed garage
For to embark on a "hajj"
-- That is,
Upon a pilgrimage --
To Mecca
(Directly east, past Miss Rebecca
of Stonybrook's farm).
I'm choosing to speak neither harm
Nor ill
Of anything Islamic.
Indeed, I will
Use only words balsamic
And healing,
Lest I should find myself dealing
With consequences
Of a hushed death decree
And find myself jumping the fences
With Salman Rushdie.

WHO THOUGHT UP YOUR NAME, CHARLEMAGNE?
Charlie was the best
Emperor of the West.
He fought all his life (like Cowboys fight Indians),
But his Ma and his Pa were mere Carolingians.
He helped out the Pope in Rome
To keep Vandals from out of his Vatican home:
Spake the Pope: "For all of my enemies which he bombards,
I shall make Charlie the King of Lombards."
Then, with all Christian Europe to bless,
Chuck fought in Spain 'til the Moors were much less.
Many a Saxon
He put into traction
And annexed an area
Now called Bavaria.
Without modern tanks,
He ruled the Franks.
Yes, Chuck was the liveliest wire
Of the Holier-Than-Thou Roman Empire,
Oft spouting words obscene
Directed due east at the Byzantine.
His last years, he fought off the force
Of Vikings from out of the Norse.
How did he keep all his fellow men straight,
Which he should love and which he should hate?
Perhaps it suffices
To mention he had one gigantic identity crisis.
Charlemagne showed most meticulous manners at dinner,
So doesn't that make him a winner?
Yet at the top of all of his ranks,
Charlemagne was the King of the Franks,
And doesn't that make him a wiener?

SAY, ISN'T PERSIA SOMEWHERE NEAR IRAN?
Among the Persian sages
Of the emerging Middle Ages
Was a poet well-versed,
Who wrote quatrains (lines numbering four
That pierce life's mystery to the core)
And then he rehearsed
Them.
Each was a gem,
Carefully written gram for gram
By Omar Khayyam.
His task was earnest:
To justly furnish
Us with questions of which
A good portion
Allow for no decent reply
(Like: "Why does our good fortune
Eventually suffer a glitch?"
Or: Why do we have to die?").
Every version
He wrote
Was written in Persian,
But in order for true believers not to note
That Omar had been agnostic,
Later translations
In civilized nations
Omitted any verses considered caustic.

WHY DOES THIS BATTLE HAVE TO BE SO HASTY?
In 1065,
Says the British archive,
The everyday actions
Of the Anglos and the Saxons
Fitted the norm...
Except for an occasional storm
That swept a few miles
Across the British Isles.
In 1066,
The Anglos and the Saxons took their licks
When Norman forces barreled
Right through the armies of King Harold.
The Norman leader bore the moniker
Of William the Conqueror,
And as his name would suggest:
He was the best.
Ever since that point in history,
It has been no mystery
That the English and the French
Have tried to throw a monkey-wrench
Into each other's mug...
Even centuries before the Chunnel was dug.

ON, DANTE...
Who would want a
Friend like Dante?
Mr. Alighieri
Was downright scary:
Who else would describe Old Lucifer vomiting
And call the gruesome scene "Divine Comedy?"
Who else would let us join his travel club
Through the realms of Beelzebub,
Through a gory
Purgatory,
As a purebred treatise
For poor dead Beatrice?
Who else would spend his days
Dreaming of ways
To follow one of the ladies
Through Hades...
And, even worse,
Composing verse
So well
About the nether regions of Hell?

THE FRENCH FOREIGN LESION
In one of the darkest pages
From the darkened Middle Ages,
Peoples European and even Teutonic
Found themselves roughly Bubonic
Just because some rats
Had infested their bowls and vats.
To be less vague,
It was the Black Plague.

SAID JOAN TO THE EXECUTIONER: WELL DONE!
Joan of Arc
Was in the dark
When it came to boys
And dating.
But a heavenly voice
And Anglo-baiting
And wars
Were in her repertoires.
Despite her young years
And despite her gender,
Her male warrior peers
Were very tender
(But not to the point of sharin'
A dance)
With this pure heroine
Of France.
Even in the face of capture,
She retained her pious rapture:
She would not deny the voice inside
Just to keep from getting fried.
Death? She did not fear it!
She hardly made a stir
When consumed, as it were,
By the spirit.

SAY MARCO, CARE FOR A GAME OF POLO?
Marco Polo was a trader
To his country.
He traded sundry
Items from the Orient,
'Cuz that was where -- more and more -- he went.
Marco's favorite was a cheese grater
He had found wholesale in Beijing,
But he didn't have anything
To grate the cheese over...
Finally, one October,
From the prow of a junk,
He hearkened to a Buddhist monk
Who was in the midst of speaking sooth
And passing along some nuggets of truth:
"If ever you should find your karma gone,
Journey many miles to Messina,
Boil up a pot of semolina,
And sprinkle on some grated parmesan."
(This dogma was pronounced in Mandarin,
Which Marco Polo was most fluent in.)
So, dipping linguini in a boiling bath,
Marco strode upon the Eightfold Noble Path
Of Wheat and Yeast...
'Til (little by little) he
Brought back to Italy
Pasta from the East.

ONCE UPON A RENAISSANCE...
In the fourteenth century, just as before,
Nations had the habit of going to war,
But somehow between the circling of vultures
Came eventual flowering of cultures.
It took months and months and months,
But finally there was a Renaissance:
Since Popes and Medicis were drenched then in moola,
The Renaissance blossomed on the Italian peninsula.
Even common folk got some smarts
During this breakthrough of the arts.
The heroes of Boccaccio
Were macho.
The Madonnas of Raphael
Were depicted au naturel.
The Humanism of Petrarch
Took antiquity out of the dark.
The Prince by Machiavelli
Went for the soft underbelly.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo
Illuminated every woman and man below.
And Leonardo: with his talent it was a cinch he
Could do the work of a da Vinci.
It was proof that people have entitlement
To at least one Age of Enlightenment.

NEW WORLDS DON'T COME CHEAP!
In 1491
Columbus got some mail
From King Ferdy and Queen Izzy:
Traveler's checks to fund
Him on a westward sail
Designed to keep him busy.
By 1493
Columbus and his crew had found
Lots of sand and granite
(And an occasional tree).
Besides which, the world was round,
And they hadn't fallen off the planet.
But if these were the Indies,
Where were all the Hindis?

IS YOUR BROTHER'S NAME "SOUTH AMERIGO?"
To the New World came Amerigo Vespucci.
He found a perfect market for the Gucci.
His given name was Amerigo;
America, she was named for him, you know.
It's great to me, it's more than just minutiae
That there are no "United States of Vespuccia."

DR. LUTHER SAYS I SHOULD DO WHAT WITH MY TIARA?
A monk, Martin Luther, took a vacation
To concentrate on starting the Reformation:
Using a quill
And some parchment,
He started to grill
The papacy with an enlargement
Upon how the church
Had left itself in the lurch.
One of his 95 theses
Was that it was too easy
(And a sin)
To merely put some money in
The coffer
To pay
For the privilege of sinning one week from today
(Even though it seemed an attractive offer).
Besides, it was an imposition on the poor,
Who couldn't afford to buy repentance anymore.
Such was the tone of the sheet
Which Luther pounded
On the church door -- with theses complete
And well-grounded.
Of course, Luther had to feel jittery;
He could have been arrested for littering.

ALL I WANT IS MY RIGHTFUL POT OF GOLD...
Hernando Cortez
Was one of those who says:
"Not everyone can adore
A conquistador."
(Actually he said it in Spanish,
Then he tried to make the Indians vanish.)
I really don't know
Why he wanted to conquer Mexico,
But I've been told
He went for the gold. v
Cortez believed that the Aztecs
(Whose country he was sullyin')
Would gladly hand over their paychecks
To him in 24-carat bullion.
Some Aztecs did think him to be Quetzlcoatl, the god,
Though they must have also found it odd
That a deity
Would steal with such spontaneity.
Montezuma was scarcely able to avenge
The deeds of this clepto,
But for turistas without Pepto,
He still has his Bismol revenge.

HENRY, THERE ARE LESS BLOODY WAYS TO GET AROUND ALIMONY!
What woman would want a date
With Henry No. VIII?
The date might lead to the altar,
From altar to boudoir,
And then, should her wife skills falter
To less than "superstar"...
(Should she become rusty
At the art of being lusty),
Hank,
The curmudgeon,
Might yank
Her to the dungeon.
There he might stretch her on the rack
Until she got her loving nature back.
Yes, he might allow his flower
To wilt inside the Tower.
If your name were Aragon,
He might simply say "So long."
If your name were Ann Boleyn,
He might plan to do you in.
If your name were Jane,
You might die of labor pain.
If your name were Anne of Cleves,
You'd be gone with next fall's leaves.
If your name were Katherine # 2,
The ravens soon would be gatherin' you,
Because the ultimate wife abuse
Is turning your wife's cranium loose.

SIR THOMAS, TELL US MORE!
I really do hope ya'
Have read Tom More's "Utopia."
It's about a place you'll never find;
It only existed in the mind.
Speaking of which,
Sir Thomas filled an important niche
In experimental science
Of the mind
By stubborn defiance
To which he was inclined:
Theologians studied assiduously
The mind/brain dichotomy
When Thomas, because he thought wrong religiously,
Was given a lopsided lobotomy.

MAY WE NAME VIRGINIA AFTER YOU?
Of all possible lovers, Elizabeth the First
Was the worst...
That is information that one detractor,
The Royal Chiropractor,
Supplied
One day before he died.
We assume it's a rumor we can expurgate,
Since Liz was the daughter of Henry the Eighth!
To put it historically,
Somewhat metaphorically:
She was meringue on
The Anglican
Pie.
She was a prick
In the Catholic
Side.
(She also jump-started the British Empire
And taught the natives, one by one,
To greatly admire
The English tongue.)
Liz had a strong ego, but also an id:
From the time that she was a kid
No man successfully wooed her:
She was England's hired Tudor.

THE QUIXOTIC AND THE DEAD
Miguel de Cervantes
Didn't necessarily want his
Don Quixote to be a hero.
Actually, Quixote was a zero:
A washed-up fictional nerd
Who always used the overblown word
And got his thrills
Tilting at windmills.
Quixote and his sidekick, Sancho Panza,
Were the laughing-stocks of all La Mancha.
Many a dewy-eyed romantic
Has been frantic...
And has fought to do
What Don Quixote could NOT do.
So it would seem
That many pursue the "Impossible Dream"
As if it were the gospel.
But for Cervantes, "impossible" was "impossible!"

PLEASE PASS THE THUMBSCREWS!
Galileo Galilei
Placed the sun at the center of the solar system one day.
When asked by an angry Pope
If it were really so, he said: "Nope;
As I contemplate the Inquisition,
I think I'll change my scientific position."

STRATFORD UPON AVON CALLING...
Is life a chore
Worth dying for?
Many a Shakespearean sonnet
Puts a spin upon it.
The tragedies of Shakespeare
Make it appear
That everybody's life and death
Resemble MacBeth.
Yet the comedies of Shakespeare
Make it clear
That everybody can laugh
With Falstaff
And merrily say
That All's Okay That Ends Okay.

PAGING MR. MILTON...
You'll be relieved
To learn that John Milton
Was conceived
In the Hyde Park Hilton
More or less legitimately,
When his mother happened to ovulate
While treating John's father intimately
In 1608.
The only cost
Was one Paradise Lost.

WHO PUT THIS CHIAROSCURO ON MY WALL?
Rembrandt left his artistic mark
With brush-strokes using light and dark.
He was no fool,
This master of the Dutch Boy's school:
He started work after artsy work,
And then he let some apprenticed jerk
Finish the fun that he'd begun.
Now, was it swell-headed
For him to take credit
Undiminished
For what someone else had finished?
The largest of his paintings was called The Night Watch,
Until a conservator cleaned off the dust and the grease
From one little swatch,
And said: "Please,
After cleaning this one little splotch,
I suggest we rename this particular study The Day Watch."
As for paintings in some fancy museum
(For that's where you usually see them),
If you ask the guard if you may touch
A painting, the guard will say: "You can't!
It's a Rembrandt!
It'll get you in Dutch!"

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THIS FIG, MR. NEWTON?
Isaac Newton, who now is dead,
Once had an apple fall on his head
While he was sitting under a tree.
"Aha!," he said, "That's gravity."
Now if you believe what some teachers teach,
It happened once or twice with a peach.
Newton made a noisy fuss
About starting the study of calculus...
And later refracted the total light spectrum
Off the surface of a guinea pig's rectum.
With raucous praise and adoration,
I give Newtonian validation:
A stable isotope of oxygen I just breathed
Contains a particle which I believe
I shall name in honor of that physicist long gone:
Within my lung there floats... an Isaac Neutron!
(Next time you drink some vino,
Watch for an Isaac Neutrino...)

IF THE MUSIC AIN'T BAROQUE, FIX IT!
From the late 16th century to 1750
The music of Europe took a turn to the nifty.
This was an era when common folk
Went for Baroque.
Some composers were major
While others were minor, I'll wager.
Some were better than amateurs,
While others merely made overtures.
Some made grand cantatas,
Concertos and sonatas.
Some of the music was sharp
For the organ and for the harp,
But some, Oh jumpin' Jehosaphat,
Was mostly flat.
The banality
Of some Baroque tonality,
As played on a hollow gourd
Or a bad-tempered clavichord,
Gave such a loud and cyclopean squawk...
That it could make Johann Sebastian balk.
Its rhetoric was a scandal,
More than George Frederick could Handel.
It kept Pachelbel
Scannin'
Past Taco Bell
For a Canon.
Maybe that was one of the reasons
Vivaldi left, well, at least for "Four Seasons."

FODDER OF HIS COUNTRY
If Washington chopped down a cherry tree,
He also chopped down tyranny.
Colonial taxes had been costin'
Too much and were soakin' the folk,
But that Tea Party in Boston
Gave the tariffs themselves a soak.
(If those were sufficient taxes
To make the colonists revolting,
You should know the IRS never relaxes
Until it takes in withholding
Enough from last month's salary check
To buy an aircraft carrier deck.
But I digress. How absurd).
Washington survived the snows of Valley Forge
To defeat in several sessions
All the hired Hessians
Of old King George
The Third.
Then to complete the revolution,
A convention was called,
Where people with famous names overhauled
The constitution.
It makes my common sense go giddy
To think this was accomplished by... a committee.

THE WOLFGANG IS AT THE DOOR
Baby Mozart
Was musically smart.
At age six,
Just for kicks,
He, Amadeus,
Played his
Own composed sonata
Much earlier than he oughta
(According to rules
Of music schools).
As a child prodigy,
He was treated like a god, you see.
Mozart had no plan
For maturing,
And thus as a man
His music was enduring,
But he was not.
He always earned less than he bought;
His creditors would accept no check from him.
Since he didn't scrimp and save,
His finances were squirrely.
He had to write his own Requiem
And ended up in a pauper's grave
Much too early.

EXCUSE ME, MA'AM, WOULD YOU PLEASE REMOVE YOUR HEAD?
Because the rowdy French mob
Was convinced that aristocracy was evil,
It took upon itself the job
Of political upheaval.
(The rabble just couldn't deal
With not storming the Bastille).
The crowds had no time to bake...
So they offered no cake
To Marie Antoinette,
Who was about to get
A different kind of just dessert,
Which hurt
Just a split-second.
Whenever Madame LaFarge beckoned,
The revolution dealt
With whoever it felt
Had been too close to the throne
(Including some of its own).
Usually, this involved a simple operation
To cure excessive respiration:
It generally proved radical
When the region between
The chin and the clavicle
Was caressed by a guillotine.

IS MOTHER RUSSIA'S FIRST NAME "CATHY?"
Any discussion
Of Catherine the Russian
Must include, I insist,
The size of her iron fist.
With Count Grigory about
(With whom she was luvvy-duvvy),
She usurped the throne from her hubby
(Who was murdered and Petered out).
Even if that was rude and mean,
That still made HER the queen.
She grabbed land, the imperialist rascal,
Stretching from the Baltics to Alaska.
She made every nondescript serf
Cultivate cabbage upon HER turf.
She could be brutal
And fiscally feudal.
To show her class, Catherine corresponded
With Potemkin and Voltaire (and also responded
To lovers with whom she would mate).
Probably, Catherine was called "The Great"
By someone who used to undress her.
She was succeeded by her son, Paul the Lesser.

WHY IS YOUR BOAT SO STEAMED UP?
Robert Fulton was giving
Steamboat rides for a living:
A decent price for the trip, a fair jaunt
Down the Hudson on the ship "Clermont."
And
On the other hand,
You've probably never heard
Of Billy Bob Barnes III.
Years before Fulton
Was consultin'
His navigational charts,
Billy Bob had attempted the arts
Of building a steamboat
That could do more than float.
Billy Bob was no esteemed professor,
So all he could try was more and more steam pressure
'Til he got the boat a shade over forty...
And thereby voided his safety warranty.
It would have been a silly job
To search for Billy Bob,
Of whom there was no clue nor trace
After the thing blew up in his face.

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF GRIND...
It's now been proven that Hegel
Discovered dialectics while eating a bagel.
"The crispy outer crust of rye,"
Said he, "Must form the thesis.
And if you bake, not fry,
The chewy middle with no greases,
That becomes the antithesis.
The procedure most efficient is
To put it between your teeth
So that the doughy wreath
Is broken into pieces
To become a brand-new thesis."
Hegel, so goes the rumor,
Had a very rye sense of humor.

DID WILLIAM KNOW WHAT A WORD'S WORTH?
Bill was frantic
To be Romantic;
And looking at the situation empirically,
Romantic is just what he was (lyrically).
Big fancy words would never awe him,
But Bill truly was a scholar, which
You would believe if you saw him
Working his way through Coleridge.
Bill's "Ode to Immortality"
Mirrored his own reality.
"This life," says he, is a "birth and a forgetting:"
The "forgetting" came 80 years later, is what I'm betting.
Wordworth's worthy words remind us that he
Was one of the
Oldtimers
Who suffered from a disease we now call "Alzheimers."
Bill said babies come to earth "trailing clouds of glory."
But that is quite another story,
Best left to theologians and gynecologists...
Or better yet, to meteorologists.

YOU'LL HAVE TO CLAP LOUDER -- THE COMPOSER IS GOING DEAF...
Ofttimes, the air in May is cloven
With the symphonies of Beethoven.
But in his later years, neither of Ludwig's ears
Could pick up the beat.
(Yes, dear readers, his woofers and his tweeters
Were set in concrete).
The reason for this, it is said,
Goes back to when he used to sit on the floor
And pour
Buckets of ice water over his head...
Wouldn't it be nice to deduce
The reason for such self-abuse?
But if you -- an amateur and a lowly minion --
Were to meet His Composership tomorrow
In order to ask HIS opinion
(For which you might want to borrow
A shovel and a formal tuxedo),
His death and his deafness would impede, so
You would not succeed, so
I think he'd be quite miffed.
But if your question were:
"Which symphony do critics prefer?",
I'd have to take the Fifth.

AN AVOGADRO SALAD
There was an Italian,
Raised on pasta and scallion,
Who rose from the masses
To count the molecules in gases.
Before him there had been no other businesses
Or individuals that could figure gram-molecular weight.
So it took a brilliant physicist
To calculate
How much gaseous volume
Inside a ballroom
Would fill one mole,
Plus how much temperature and pressure
Are required to bless your
Soul.
If he extrapolated all that from the gas of one cucumber,
He definitely had Avogadro's number.

WHAT'S THE MATTER, NAPPY, ARE YOUR FINGERS COLD?
When in search of grand conquest,
Napoleon put his hand inside his vest...
But he was never seen
That way with Josephine.
Napoleon fought his way
Behind the Grande Arm�e
Until he got to Moscow,
From which he returned... somehow.
When his campaign in Russia was through
(And after pausing to find himself shelved
On the Island of Elba),
Napoleon had his Waterloo.
He was sent to a distant St. Helena home,
Where he expired of a vicious melanome.
Recent tests have brought to bear
Traces of arsenic in his hair:
So all the while
He was in exile,
One of his enemies was finessing the art
Of slowly picking Napoleon's bones apart.

EXCUSE ME, DON'T YOU BELONG BACK IN IBERIA?
Born in raucous
Downtown Caracas,
Sim�n Bol�var
Traveled slowly and far
Until he broke
The Spanish yoke.
He kept his courage up
By sipping cocoa
From a twelve-ounce cup
On the lower Orinoco.
Because of Sim�n's fame,
His Bol�var family name
Was used to name "Bolivia"
(For those who like such trivia).
Nowadays, on the Cinco de Mayo,
From Antarctica to Ohio,
Latin Americans find it cool
That Bol�var ended the Spanish rule.
But I'm still not hearing anyone from Spain
Complain...

SO WHAT IF YOU COMMAND THE POWERS OF DARKNESS?
Goethe wrote a play
In two parts
(Not seen everyday)
Which charts
The downward spiral of Mr. Faust.
Now Faust, when he was soused,
Made a pact with the devil
Which put his soul in traction;
But the deal was not on the level,
Since God had HIS fingers in the action.
By the end of Faust's mortal trial,
He'd gone back into self-denial.
By the time the actors had washed off their greasepaint,
The audience was convinced that Faust was a saint!
You have to wonder at the awful ease
With which God fooled Mephistopheles.
So here's the moral to which you must hearken:
Never put your money on the Dark One.

ADIOS TO THE WILD FRONTIER!
General Santa Anna
Of Mexico
Went bananas
At the Alamo.
Things went ka-pooey
For Jim Bowie.
It was the end of the docket
For Davy Crockett.
Anger was induced in
Old Sam Houston,
'Cuz no Texan had been left livin'.
But the Mexican troops, you know,
Were just doing the job they'd been given:
To "Dismember the Alamo!"

VICKIE, CAN ALBERT COME OUT AND PLAY?
Things were never sticky for Queen Vickie
As she ruled the British Empire.
She drank her Earl Grey Tea
And never gazed on poverty.
She never had to buy a ticket to watch cricket
Her entire
Life.
As wife
To Cousin Albert, she was frigid
As her rigid
Rules demanded.
(She had never been reprimanded
As a child).
Her fingernails were nicely filed;
Her dress had lace
Upon the cuff.
She showed grace,
And was never (never ever) in the buff.
She had no digestive tract,
So it is true
As a matter of fact,
That she never had to sit upon the loo.
It was boring
How she dressed
From neck to knee: you could see
She was repressed.
Her life was so... Victorian.

WHEN IT CAME TO SEWING MACHINES, ELIAS KNEW HOWE.
A stitch in time
Came in 1849.
One night, Elias dreamed.
He saw an engine which seemed
To be robbin'
From the bobbin
To tweedle
Thread through the needle.
Everything seemed condemned
To be hemmed.
Such was the fabric (or theme)
Of Mr. Howe's dream.
When the bloke
Awoke,
He didn't invent the cotton gin,
But grabbed some hunks of metal and tin...
And thus, from the mind of Elias Howe
(Somehow)
The sewing machine sprang full blown,
Or should I say, well sewn...

NO THANKS, I COULDN'T HAVE A BITE MORE!
Mrs. Donner
Looked upon her
Family in distress.
Such a cold and hungry mess!
(There was no more sassafras
Or herbal tea to warm that cold and wintry pass).
So, since she had no Tupperware,
She decided to hold a Donner Party there.

"BRING 'EM YOUNG," SAID BRIGHAM YOUNG...
Like a latter-day Melchezidek,
Brigham guided the Mormon trek
Across the North American plains,
Through the land of cereal grains.
Young prophet Young, during his commute, saw
The land of Utah.
That was the vision that he kept seeing:
A land of promise just right for skiing.
Like John the Baptist, he had no money,
But only locusts and honey.
Life isn't always a bed of roses
When you're the American Moses.

IS ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING IN THE SUN?
How did she write verse? -- Let me count the ways! --
She wrote verse after having read voraciously
And needing to write some words down ostentaciously.
But I could cite worse than her literary Grace.
She wrote verse from her room on Wimpole Street,
Until her heart was clobbered
When she met beloved Robert,
And it palpitated, and it skipped one simple beat.
She wrote verse freely with no taxes on its use,
As freely and as purely as a reformed welfare cheat.
She wrote verse with a pen that expressed her views
While eating salads lettuce-y and carrotty,
Only to find it soaking in the vinegar! -- And, if I choose,
I shall but menace her by using parody.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE WAS NO SLAVE TO FASHION (NOR VICE-VERSA).
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Was able to show,
By writing Uncle Tom's Cabin,
The racist cruelty America was havin'.

Eliza fleeing across the ice
With desperate boldness
Is a universal image of sacrifice,
But also of one person's coldness
-- To an absolute low degree --
In the person of Simon Legree.
Let's just say that it would be wrong
To include him in that People Who Need People song.

HERE COME THE CENSORS, GUSTAVE...
Gustave Flaubert
Walked down to the square
To see if he could see
Who married Dr. Bovary.
That helped his mind to grovel,
And so he wrote a novel
Of the "post-bridal" kind
About the dangerously idle mind
Of Dr. Bovary's spouse.
She got restless around the house,
So, giving her face a fix,
She looked elsewhere for her kicks.
And Gustave Flaubert
Was there,
Following the fictional ovary
Of Madame Bovary.

MY THOUGHTS ON THIS ARE STILL EVOLVING...
Aboard the good ship "Beagle,"
Observing tortoises and eagles,
Darwin happened
Upon a theory that resolved
The way life adapted
And evolved.
Darwinism
Caused a schism,
And many were against him
(Almost everyone alive).
Still, if truth will benefit us,
And if his theory proves the fittest,
It will survive.
So if you ever voted
-- After careful reflection --
For the one who best promoted
The Origin of the Species,
It should be easy:
Charles Darwin would be the Natural Selection.

BUT KARL, I DO LIKE THE PROLETARIAN WAY YOU'VE TRIMMED YOUR BEARD...
Karl Marx
Felt that public parks
Should be public in every way,
Lest capitalistic decadence and power
Make the little people pay
For sniffing every flower...
Yes, every tree
Of the bourgeoisie
(Particularly from the lobbies of the Marriott)
Should be turned over to the proletariat.
It sounds so good on paper,
But the fate Marxism met
Echoes the silly caper
Of the Russian Soviet:
Communism lost its wall in Berlin,
And took it squarely on the chin.
I'm sure Mr. Marx would say
(If interviewed today)
That true communism
Has not yet arisen.
The pure form has not been tested,
And Gorbachev should be arrested.

CARE TO JOIN US IN A CONGO LINE?
The Spanish and the Portuguese
(With an ethic that depraves)
Established many colonies
In Africa for slaves.
Next, a French governor sent scribes
To instruct the Congo tribes:
"I know that you are Bantu,
But I order every man to
Speak French.
Not to mention every wench.
And Swahili
Really
Won't do."
The Belgians, too,
Made this assessment
Of the Congo Basin:
"It's not a bad investment
We would be facin'.
If we chase the natives off it,
We could make a decent profit!"
Then the English, with their own intent,
Visited the darkest continent.
Knowing this, it is only fair
To ask if there is room
For us to care
Whether Stanley met Livingstone, I presume?

WHO'S THAT LURKING IN THE CURTAINS?
Among the U.S. presidents
Who used the White House as their residence
Was Honest Abe,
Who had to save
The nation's unity bravely
And end the abomination of slavery.
(That was one of his nicest touches.)
Lincoln saw that War was fought Civilly...
And delivered us from the allegedly evil clutches
Of Robert E. Lee.
Then one day, Abraham Lincoln
Was thinkin'
About going to see a play.
He should have picked a different day.

MA BELL FED ALEXANDER GRAHAM CRACKERS...
When Alexander spoke through that ragtime mouthpiece
"Come here, Watson, I need you,"
There were no other phones in the North or Southeast,
No operators to greet you,
No long-distance calls nor call-waiting,
No phone solicitations infuriating,
No beepers nor cellular phones,
Not even busy tones,
Not even a minimal
Busy signal.
Someone had to pay for progress, but still...
I find it more cruelty than mirth
That Watson was the one who paid the bill,
That first telephone bill on earth.
Yes, ladies and gents:
He had to shell
Out $.23
To finance Ma Bell.

LIEUTENANT, HOW DO YOU PRONOUNCE "SIOUX?"
General George A. Custer
Often would bluster
About the courage he could muster
In wars and organized bear-shoots.
Custer's attitude got fixed
In 1876,
When he and his men were shorn
(Close to their hair-roots)
On a grassy knoll
With a gentle roll
Near the Little Big Horn
River...
Did I mention his perforated liver?
(An arrow
Is quite narrow
And will often leave a hole
In body and soul.)
Custer thought his strategies good
For the lay of the land,
But in this particular neighborhood
It led to his Last Stand.

NOBODY COULD EVER CON EDISON!
When Grandma was home
With her grammaphone
And an apple pie meant for the oven;
When Sis and her boyfriend were intent on lovin,'
Not by the moon's full crescent,
But by a light incandescent;
When Father was working outside
To harness electrical juices
And didn't get fried
Because of some safety fuses;
When Mother turned down the lights
To perform her pagan rites;
When Brother got in a jam
That ended him up in jail
And his parents by telegram
Were able to post his bail;
When Auntie, the hypochondriac,
Was last seen
Chewing upon a Big Mac
In her heart-and-lung machine;
When uncle, named Cheap Joe
Spent his quarters at tonight's peepshow;
When the family all sacked out
At night with no blackout
To melt the ice in the frig
Even a smidge...
The donor of all these fulfillments,
Yes, the pharmacist who pushed this good medicine,
Was King of the Filaments,
Thomas Alva Edison.

MARY BAKER GOT CAUGHT IN A SPIRITUAL EDDY.
Mary Baker, as a child,
Was frail.
That is, bacteria smiled
Inside her and made her pale.
It doesn't take too much speculation
To imagine each and every painful inoculation...
So perhaps the black-and-blue contusions
Caused by many medical appliances
Drove her to spiritual transfusions
And to the Christian Sciences.
Hence the cosmic truth that she embraced:
A spirit is a terrible thing to waste...
Particularly when it's oddly
Conjoined with your average body.
Mary Baker Eddy
Held steady
And did just fine
Until the age of 89.
My computer must be quite fond of her:
It just flashed her name on my Christian Science Monitor.

NOW WHO'S DEAD, FRED?
The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche's
Was basically: "To each his
Own..."
(But "your own,"
If you are weak
Is limited in tone
To turning the other cheek).
Nietzsche's writings would condone
Forced mastery of some super-duperman
Over every other worm-like human also-ran.
The identity of this superhuman beast
Who lords it over all the rest of us
Cannot be "God," since God is long deceased...
"God is dead,"
Said Fred,
"And only ever was a symbol for the best in us."
If we can't look to heaven
For projected supermen,
Looking to Nietzsche himself is worse than bad:
He spent the last eleven
Years of life within a loony bin,
Staring into space, stark raving mad.

WHERE DID CARRIE NATION INTEND TO CARRY THE NATION?
Bartenders would quake
To their roots
And shake
In their boots
When Carrie would choose
To enter their saloons and bars
And to approach their booze
(Nicely stored in bottles and jars).
Why did the purveyors of hootch
Tremble so mooch?...
'Cuz she had a hatchet
To match it.

PARDON ME, SIGMUND, YOUR SLIP IS SHOWING!
Sometimes I get annoyed
At Mr. Sigmund Freud
For having seen sex
Behind every reflex.
If you've ever yelled "You mother!"
At your second-oldest brother,
"Well now," Freud would say
In a gender-specific way,
"That shows malice
Toward the phallus
And a strange disgust
For the female bust."
But maybe Sigmund is not to blame
For confusing one sex with the other;
Maybe his problems first came...
About when he was unloved by his mother.

YOU'RE CLEARED FOR TAKE-OFF, ORVILLE!
Orville and Wilbur put daily bread in their baskets
By fixing worn-out handlebar gaskets:
That is, they put money in their pockets
By greasing bicycle sprockets.
This training proved to be of noble worth
When time came to slip the surly bonds of earth...
Imagine, if you will, an early afternoon
With the sun glistening on a Kitty Hawk dune,
The morning dew no longer damp
Upon that wooden take-off ramp.
There is a scene of solemn mystery
About the machine about to make history:
Wilbur tests the fragile flaps
And then he checks the spark plug gaps.
Next he kisses the propellor's rotor
And brings to life the mighty motor.
Orville greases the chain with petroleum jelly,
Then mans the fuselage on his belly.
At the controls, his goggles come up
And he gives a cheery... thumbs up.
Now the seaside still is shattered
And the Brothers Wright are flattered
More and more
By the throaty engine roar
Designed to give the gift
Of flight a lift.
The biplane surges faster and faster
Then comes the world's first air disaster:
The aircraft dives, causing grief and pain.
Orville's pant-cuff got caught in the chain.

WHO DUG THIS TRENCH IN FLANDERS FIELD?
Austria-Hungary ruled the Balkan peninsula.
Its office of "Archduke" was manned
By one supposedly invincible
Franz Ferdinand.
On Ferd's visit to Sarajevo
In 1914 (imperially),
He caught a bullet just below
His spleen (arterially)
And died.
Another assassin's trophy
Was Franz Ferdinand's wife, Sophie.
Since the nasty deed had been done
By a Serbian nationalist kook,
Nations, one by one,
Lined up to praise or rebuke.
That's why boys from Delaware
Had to end up "over there."
At least that's what my history teacher said:
"World War I arose through intertwining alliances;"
But the soldiers that are dead
Clearly
Have no interest in any theory
Of military sciences.

PANCHO, LET'S RAID THE GRINGO'S VILLA!
Pancho Villa,
(After raiding and burning some border towns)
Was eating a corn tortilla,
While his men took body counts.
A message arrived from Zapata
Which said: "You just gotta
Help us beat our enemy...
For, essentially,
Your life won't be worth a plugged nickel
Unless you make your attacks political.
(You can still be a thief,
But if you have a cause and a belief,
Nobody will look
Upon you as a common crook.)"
Pancho said: "Viva Zapata!
That is what I gotta
Do."
And before he was through,
He had earned the title
Of "anti-imperialist" Mexican idol.
You gotta hand it
To some political cheaters:
They know how to go from "bandits"
To "respected leaders."

MAY I RECOMMEND THIS MANURE ENTITLED "BOLSHEVIK?"
The peasants screamed
In 1917:
"The Czar
Has gone too far."
(Actually they'd been screaming it for years,
But it took took a while to turn their gears.)
These peasants were miserable creatures:
Strikes, disorders and food rioting
Were some of the more positive features
Of their Russian society.
Out of the sticks
Rose the Bolsheviks,
Led by Lenin and Trotsky,
Who (because they were anxious to give)
Saw to it that many were shotsky...
Such are the tasks of any progressive.
Lenin became the gremlin
Who ruled the Kremlin.
I can hear him speaking yet
In his voice so gently jolting:
"We were hungry and Soviet;
I predict, the world will find us permanently revolting."

MR. LINDBERGH, CARE TO FAVOR US WITH A SOLO?
Gnarly
Charlie,
Of Swedish extraction,
Was a man of action,
Not of adjectives or conjunctions.
He liked to fly.

"The 'Spirit of St. Louis' functions,"
Said he, "Plus so do I."
Then, with the front door sealed,
He suggested: "We'll see you at Orly Field!"

MR. CAPONE, YOU'RE SUCH A CIVIC-MINDED GUY!
Al Capone called prohibition
A "bunch of bull,"
And had no contrition.
Elliot Ness was called "untouchable,"
And the entire FBI
(Every agent and spy),
Got quite nervous
At the type of service
Al dispensed with tommy-guns
To earn the Mob its ominous funds.
Then one day
They put Capone away:
Not for placing concrete shoes
On people in the river;
Not for misgotten booze
That quickly rots the liver;
But because, in balancing his checkbook,
Al -- as expected -- took
Less than exacting specification,
And they got him for tax evasion.
The judge said: "Whichever rap Al has
Is good enough for Alcatraz."

GRAPES OF WRATH MAKE FOR SOUR WINE...
Imagine, if you will,
That the topsoil flies from your farm.
Your credit at the bank is nil.
Your landlord wishes you harm.
The stock market has gone through the floor.
You don't have savings anymore.
You can't grow a single weed.
Your family's in constant need.
Your voice is feeling croaky.
Even if you make it to Salinas,
(Just between us),
People will still call you "Okie."
I think that you can see
You would definitely need an unemployed rest.
Wouldn't you, like the economy,
Feel depressed?

WHY IS MRS. EINSTEIN SHAKING HER WATCH?
Albert Einstein
Lived in space and time,
But when given a query,
He'd answer with Relativity Theory.
Al thought that you could slow down time
By traveling through space
(And the years would not seem many).
On returning, it would be sublime
To greet some future human race
(Since your own dear family and friends
Would long since have met their ends).
One complication
Would be due to inflation:
Your dime wouldn't be worth a penny.
Einstein also stated that the universe is curved
Like the front end of a toboggan,
So that -- if you could see far enough -- you would be well served
To check out the haircut on the back of your noggin.

WHO'S BEEN MESSING WITH MY FUEL GAUGE?
Amelia Earhart, we surmise,
Flew the Not So Friendly Skies.
To be more specific:
She disappeared in the Pacific.

YUKIKO, SHALL WE VISIT PEARL HARBOR?
Admiral Yamamoto
Posed for a photo
While talking with his General Staff:
"Just for a laugh
And since the winter is cold,
I can't think WHY we
Shouldn't be so bold
As to buzz Hawaii!"
Upon his aircraft carrier,
He got a bit warier,
And said: "If we swoop in from the east,
At least
Let's not visit on a Sunday morn.
It would be so... foreign."
When his raid
Made
The Americans angry enough
That they responded with stuff
Like bazookas and tanks,
Yamamoto replied,
With sadness inside,
"I thought our Zeros were shooting blanks!"

ENRICO, I DON'T KNOW YOU FROM ATOM!
Talking to people and boring them
Inside an ice cream emporium,
Enrico Fermi
Said: "Do you dare me
To make an atom-split?
That should make a hit."
In his humble way
That day,
Enrico took some radium
Under a stadium
(Or was it uranium?
I get them mixed up in my cranium...)
And caused a chain reaction,
Proving that liquefaction
Of foes in a nuclear cloud
Was possible, for crying out loud!

THIS IS JUST DESSERT, MR. "ZEKE HYLE"
In World War II,
Adolf Hitler sent
Millions to Stalingrad or some other venue
To die semi-innocent.
Meanwhile, Hitler's barbarians
Mistreated all non-Aryans.
Then things went sour
For Hitler in
Berlin.
It was a total loss of power.
When the Russians came to town
To hunt the Führer down,
Adolf had to hunker
Down inside a concrete bunker
With his sweetie, Eva Braun.
We have since learnt
That both got burnt
And are now completely gone.

JOE, IT'S A COLLECTIVE CALL FROM THE UKRAINE!
After Lenin died and turned into wax
Inside his tomb
(For the Soviet people to cry over),
Stalin grabbed power and committed acts
Of doom
(For the Soviet people to die over).
Repressive and gung ho,
Joe excised all his rivals,
Hatcheted Trotsky by remote in Mexico,
And prevented other survivals.
Historians of terror still examine
Stalin's concept of collectivization:
Such as when he invented a famine
For causing Ukrainian extermination.
The wartime deaths of twenty million Russians
Were for Joe just minor repercussions.
At Yalta, history shows he dealt
Words of poisoned syrup...
To intimidate Churchill and Roosevelt
And to grab all of Eastern Europe.
Joe led a life of crime,
Just Stalin for time.

MR. BURBANK ALWAYS COUNTS TO TREE...
Some people are very well suited
For the study of plants, deeply rooted:
Whenever Luther Burbank got ill,
His veins were clogged with chlorophyll.
His limbs were somewhat mechanical;
But his heart was totally botanical.
He retired in a town called "Santa Rosa."
Was that by accident, do you suppose... uh?
Let it be said to Luther Burbank's memorial
That the advice he gave was always arborial.
"If you're wondering," he'd say to anyone near,
"The Lombardy is very Poplar this year.
But if you're drinking a Ros� wine,
May I recommend an audacious but subtle Pine?
On the other hand, if you're feeling papal,
You might try the Vatican Maple.
Some folks prefer branches in the fragile realm,
And so they correctly choose Dutch Elm.
But for a tree to give you a fair shake
During a 5.7 earthquake,
The aspen can be most entertaining...
At least that part that's still remaining."
Once lecturing in suburban Poughkeepsie,
He was told by a fortune-telling gypsy:
"Luther Burbank, you will die in California,
And millions of deciduous trees will mourn ya'.

SORRY, I REFUSE TO WEAR BRITISH TOGS...
Gandhi was born in India,
Where he gazed for hours at a zinnia
Before becoming skittish
At the idea of remaining British.
He squinted through wire-rimmed glasses
While taking a bare-footed stroll:
So that is why the Indian masses
Called him "Mahatma" ("The Great Soul").
The struggle for India's independence
And vitality
Had to start with his life of abstinence
And spirituality.
"Be gentle, and you will find,"
Mahatma would insist,
"That with the proper set of mind,
You can passively resist."
Gandhi taught a lesson that inspires:
One of the prime ingredients
In breaking away from empires
Is civil disobedience...

YOU DON'T HAVE TO ANTHROPOLOGIZE TO ME, MARGARET!
If what you're looking for
Is sex, and how to get Samoa,
(Or how to treat your sweetie
In Tahiti);
If you're in the essence
Of pubescence,
And you're feeling finicky
About growing up in New Guinikea;
If you've ever gotten lesions
From Polynesians;
If your role as "female" or "male"
Is growing increasingly stale;
If your favorite cultural pattern
Resembles that of Saturn;
If you find your life delimitive
And want to live as a primitive...
The only author you need
To read
Is Margaret Mead.
It can be no musty mystery
That trustees lured and made her
The curator
Of the Museum of Unnatural History.

WHY DO I GET NAUSEOUS JUST THINKING OF LIFE?
Jean Paul Sartre was an existentialist exponent
(Not an exponent like you find in math,
But one who was full of wrath
At existence, which was his opponent).
Sartre pointed out that everyone has the right to choose
During a life full of dread and despair,
But no matter what you choose, you lose...
And then you vanish in thin air.
This thinking recurred
In the Theater of the Absurd
And among the Beatniks -- in every gradation
Of alienation.
Then came cultural imperialism
With its godless nihilism,
Which led in turn
To the 60's phrase: "Burn, baby, burn!"
All that destruction is now found in the beat
Of rap music -- which is yelled on the street.
And rapsters have been stopped for stealing
While concealing
A gun.
As a matter of fact, there WAS one
Who was arrested last week by a peace officer:
All this because of some French philosopher!

LOOK WHAT YOUR HOUND DOG JUST DID TO MY BLUE SUEDE SHOES!
The contortions that Elvis contorted
While singing "Well, bless-uh my soul"
Disgusted a critic, who snorted:
"So this is rock 'n roll!"
His call for moral repentence
End with the following sentence:
"It should behoove
Young Mr. Presley
Not to make his body move
Quite so expressively."
Health dissipated,
With a belly outrageous,
He still titillated
The folks in Las Vegas.
Then something led
The King to his throne,
To mix drugs on his own
And to drop over dead.
His daughter (whose name is Lisa Marie)
Once was married to Michael Jackson,
The singer who, through surgery,
Tries to look Anglo-Saxon.
So don't believe the National Enquirer
Where it says in bold-faced script
That Elvis was seen alive by a fan or admirer.
No, he was just turning over in his crypt.

NORMA JEAN, DID YOUR SYMBOL JUST CRASH?
Was being a famous sex toy
Enough to vex and annoy
Marilyn Monroe?
Did she feel so low
That she did herself in
By cancelling her own adrenaline?
Did provocatively lowered clothes
Contribute to her overdose?
Did her image on celluloid
Push her to her final void?
Did her marriage with Joe Di Maggio
Cause this tradaggio?
Didn't she get enough hugs?
Is that what pushed her over to drugs?
Or... if it was not a CIA job,
Was it a plot by the mob?

WORDS OF FROST WARM MY HEART...
Robert Frost I did not know.
His verses I've known somewhat, though;
His copyrights won't interfere
If I should dare to twist them so.
My little mind must find it queer
That Frost's verse oozes New Hampshire,
Even though the Golden Gate
Was where he started life's career.
I think it was poetic fate
That put him into such a State.
His meters often seemed to leap
Toward Pulitzers at any rate.
His words are lovely, strong, and steep,
But they have meaning dark and deep,
And now their author, too, must sleep.
And now their author, too, must sleep.

"ICH BIN EIN IN-BETWEENER!"
In between the halcyon days of power
(When we honored General Eisenhower)
And the days of the Vietnamese War
(Which was treated like a cuspidor --
But without the amenities),
Came the Kennedys.
Jack and Jackie
Knew just how they had to dress...
And thus were never tacky
(Except for the act that Jack would do
With any actress
Out of public view).
On the upside, Kennedy blew the whistle
On the Cuban missile
Crisis.
He mastered rhetorical devices.
The First Couple seemed like filigree
Upon the U.S. citizenry.
But this was not Camelot
(Lyndon Johnson was no Lancelot).
I don't mean to be callous,
But have you ever reflected
That the limousine in Dallas
Should have been better protected?

MAO-TSE, BITE YOUR TUNG!
Experts view the Chinese calendar
For 1934
With malice and wonder,
For
The months were incredibly large.
Some can't believe their ears
To hear the Red Army had a Long "March"
That lasted nearly two years.
In 1949 came the commedia dell'arte,
When Communists held an even longer "Party."
Their leader was Mao,
And how!
His profusion of vultures
Led to a Revolution of Cultures...
Some say he was the cause
Of over a billion dead,
While others insist it was
Only hundreds of millions instead.
Mao's death necessitated
A loss of face,
And when the mourners contemplated
The disgrace
Of their waxy Chairman displayed for eternity
In a Mao jacket,
They, like a drunken fraternity,
Made a long, loud racket...

NOW WHO HAS THE DREAM?
Martin Luther King had a dream
That tolerance is IN you,
That you can help to form a human team
(Regardless of your skin hue).
Gandhi was his antecedent
For being civilly disobedient
To ensure that racism flounders:
With sit-ins at lunch counters,
Taking rightful places in buses,
Being the one who quietly discusses,
Standing before police
(Withstanding pressurized hoses),
Handing people roses,
And preaching the gospel of peace.
Others wouldn't take the oppression in silence,
And some of them turned (of course) to violence.
But the most violent release
Of hate we had to see
Happened (to one who had peace
As his emphasis)
On a balcony
In Memphis.

MOON OVER MY NASA...
In 1969,
Things went fine
Aboard Apollo 11
As it rocketed into heaven.
Soon,
It neared the moon.
Inside his air-tight nodule,
Buzz Aldrin buzzed the lunar module
(Which cost more than a Rolls or a Bentley)
Down to the lunar dust,
Where it didn't bust...
But landed gently.
It took not long for a ladder to drop,
So Neil Armstrong could hop
Down to plant a foot
On lunar soot.
But before he stepped,
He said it was for "Mankind" he leapt.
(And Cronkite wept.)
Meanwhile, it seemed opportune
That their buddy circle the moon,
While the moon at its girth
Got to circle the earth,
And the earth (what fun!)
Kept circling the sun.

GIVE HER LIBERTY, OR GIVE HER REST...
Why were there no hurries
For men to pursue
The concept for centuries
That women have rights, too?
Did it give men's ego a scar?
Did equality go too far?
Can't the arm that rocks the cradle
Rock corporate foundations?
Can't the arm that stirs the ladle
Stir the conscience of foreign nations?
Today's females need to know
That they can help to run the show:
One woman behind them
Is Gloria Steinem.
Her death, when she dies,
Will leave a societal fissure.
Her epitaph will say: "Here lies
Gloria Steinem, and we will Ms. her."

YES, BUT NEUROTICISM SELLS MOVIE TICKETS...
I find myself crying tears by the gallon
As I ponder the mortal panic
Of Woody Allen,
Who is manic...
Depressive as it may sound,
It's not just Woody's plight:
Annie Hall's boyfriend also found
That all of us are uptight.
Okay, Woody does make us laugh;
Gladly, we admit it.
Behind it all is sadness, though; and half
The audience just doesn't get it.
It's possible that the mind of Strindberg, or
Sartre (or Kierkegaard) is regulative
For what is sliced on the cutting-room floor:
And all that remains is negative.

NOT JUST JUSTICE -- SUPREME JUSTICE!
Anita and Clarence went up on the Hill
To fetch a bipartisan media thrill
About what goes down
In Congress Town.
Congressmen with dead-pan faces
In the midst of the morass
Were obviously having fun:
Putting Anita through her paces,
They pronounced the word "har-RASS"
Like a dirty pun,
Until a lawyer squelched that sport
By referring to the "HARR-is" report.
Then Anita Hill came down
From Congress Town,
'Cuz she had had her fill
Of telling how Clarence
Had been at no loss
Of sexual variance
When he had been boss
Over this Ms. Hill.
So 52 wise & mature-looking men
Put Humpty-Dumpty together again:
Claiming Clarence was full of promise,
When they should have been doubting Thomas.

THEY ALSO SERB WHO ONLY DECIMATE...
A lack of nationalism disturbs
The Serbs.
Even today they build gun foundries
To expand their Bosnian boundaries,
And every one of them in Herzegovina
Acts like a hyena.
But let's be even-handed,
Lest only Serbs be reprimanded:
Also the Croats
Are guilty of plots
To put bullets
In Serbian gullets.
And to trust the Muslims in the area
To forget their historical animosities
Would be even scarier:
They've had their own atrocities.
Now we foreigners want to enter in
And make things right,
To scold and mentor them:
"Now, now, you mustn't fight!"
I wonder if all this wouldn't have gone so far
If every American had bought a Yugo car?

THE LEGACY LIVES?
It's possible for the governor of a southern state
To become a presidential martyr;
One example I might recapitulate
Is that of Jimmy Carter.
Nobody said that his honesty was infected,
But, let's face it, he didn't get re-elected.
You may see what I am hintin'
When I bring up the character issue
With reference to Bill Clinton,
Who (if you're female) might like to kiss you.
In any case, it's easy to state
That Clinton's libido stays up late.
Ms. Lewinsky, It's a cinchsky, Took the former president down,
But hers was not the only game in town:
It turns out many females, whether Ruth or Beth or Audrey,
Had already made Bill tarnished and tawdry.
William Jefferson's historical destiny is unreachable,
At least according to a source that's... unimpeachable.

BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE
After tossing Iraqis from Kuwait,
Georgie Bush's father didn't take the bait
Of marching all the way to downtown Bagdad...
Cause he thought the results would certainly sag bad.
Yes, George Bush, Senior, thought it quite unwise
To invade so far with his army guys:
Having been quite an intelligent student,
He knew for sure: "It wouldn't be prudent."
But leave it to his son,
The less intelligent one,
To perform a Neo-Con
Upon
Buckets and reserves of needed oil
To be gained through Iraq's turmoil.
Will the petroleum soon be squirtin'
Through the pipelines of Halliburton?
Did Junior use some devious ends
Trying to enrich his oily friends?
Did our frat-boy insult allied nations
To finance SUV juice for our vacations?
Was the fiction of WMDs
Honestly a way to ease
Islamic nations toward democracy?
Start with the Saudis, is our plea !
And what if, as many have feared,
Free elections lead to the ayatollah's beard?
Will democracy still be the wish of George,
Or will he cram Chalabi down the people's gorge?
Say now, who was found in a spider hole
Looking just like a hairy mole?
Saddam Hussein
Was perhaps insane,
But more likely a megalomaniac.
Now there's no way to put things back
The way they were,
And so for sure
We need to accomplish the "accomplished mission"
By getting out of the overheated kitchen.
In the cities and in the boonies
The Shiites and the angry Sunnis
(Plus some of the smaller and the larger Kurds)
Are exchanging bullets along with words.
They're sending out their terminators
To extinguish U.S. collaborators,
Showing they can wait and wait some more,
Until it's time for their civil war.
The Middle East is in a state of shock
While for America, it's a simple case
Of being stuck between Iraq
And a hard place.
That's what happens when people make war instead of love.
That's what happens when Bush comes to shove.

STILL JUST ALONG FOR THE RIDE...
As we view earth's joys and defects
From the throes
Of a millennium that has slouched to its close,
We just keep wondering what might come next...
Will dreaded judgmental seraphim
Deconstruct earth and its glamours
(At a whim)
With sledgehammers?
Will family values rot,
Will loyalty be bought
And sold,
Will milk of human kindness clot
As affections grow cold?
Will each of us retire to a fortified house
And bolt the doors down tightly,
Traveling only by computer, by mouse
And modem to electronic villages nightly?
Will each of us become his or her own faction,
A mini-mini-microcosm of social inaction?
Who knows? You'll never find life's glory
If your anxieties are anticipatory.
So as we keep circling around the sun,
We might as well laugh and love and sing
-- You and me and everyone --
'Til we see what the future may bring.

Hacken Main Page > Poetry Index > Just Along for the Ride