alas, back to pounding the pavement. getting pounded by the pavement. getting beaten half to death by the goddamn pavement. to think, i am not good enough for this urban outfitters. am i not urban? outfitted? young and/or hip? no, i am none of these things. i am a 23 year old former counter-culture individual whose piercings have all closed up. so it goes.

ok. so, keith waldrop and clan have put out (finally) _pegasus descending_ (the book of the best bad verse). and there's some pretty awful shit in there. there's some shit which i'm sure is awful but i could see myself writing as well. that's the scary part. and then there's the fine line between laughing jovially at the missteps of perfectly competent, lovely poets, and laughing riotously at those guys who will only ever be known as bad. which one has to be careful of because if one is me then one could quite possibly live out one's poetic existence being solely commemorated in the anthology of poems that sucked. and if there's such a thing as karma, watch out.

that said, i thought I'd post some of my favorites. the first is by Richard Crashaw (1612-1649), an English poet who apparently is pretty popular on the isle. One was too horrendous to post (it was about Ethiopians), but this one I could not keep to myself.

Blessed be the paps which thou hast sucked

Suppose he had been Tabled at thy Teats,
Thy hunger feels not what he eats:
He'll have his Teat ere long (a bloody one).
The Mother then must suck the son.

Here's one of Robert Browning's that made me laugh out loud:

(from)The Throstle

Summer is coming, summer is coming
I know it, I know it, I know it.
Light again, leaf again, life again, love again!
Yes, my wild little Poet.

I mean, "leaf again?" Ok. I'll post one more and then I'm done. This one is just the first two lines of a poem (_pegasus_ starts with the worst openings of poems in this millenium of English poetry) by Harry Edward Mills.

(from)The Squaw's Lullaby

Sleep, my little papoose;
Thy father hunteth the moose.

Fair 'nough. I'm done. Yours in poesie --