early works, part I

Here are some poems I wrote when I was 11 or 12.

The first one kind of peters out at the end. Fuck you, I was in sixth grade. It was probably my bedtime.

The Refrygerator

Refrygerator! Refrygerator! freezing bright
In the kitchens of the night:
What industrial gizmo or widget
Could keep the meat loaf so darn frigid?

In what distant factories
What engineer, so very wise
Froze the ice inside thy gizzard?
Was it a sorcerer or wizard?

‘Twas Westinghouse, maybe Amana
That keepeth cool pears and bananas?
Was it GE that helped keep cold
My lunch, so it would not grow mold?

So magnetic is thy door,
Was it made in Singapore?
A lot of stuff this door will hold,
Thy wondrous door, so white, so cold.

What temperatures canst thou drop to
Before thou art all frozen too?
How very icy thou art to see.
Did he who made the Stove make thee?

What hand could paint thy door so white
Or make the switch for thy little light?
Was this all a high-tech trick—
Or was this, truly, all magic?

 

And here’s a Dadaist poem I wrote around the same time by randomly selecting some words from a dictionary and pulling them out of a hat:

The

Put the kibosh on is bringing entremets
Clypeus are is are
Are keeps geriatrics gizzard
Oxazine spurred bridoon timid
Gesticulating antecedes cloven-hoofed learning
It dolmen puffs cloistered
Clytaemnestra speiss nonillion misbelieves
Precipitated berserk happen is
Cnidus brook trout it devious
The tipped pugilist boschvark!

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