THE FUNNY POET RENOUNCES FUNNY POETRY
				    
	     The Funny Poet Renounces Funny Poetry And Concentrates On Making The World A 
	     Better, More Beautiful Place (In Which He Has Sex More Often)

	The everlasting universe of things
	Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
	Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
	Now lending splendor....
		--from "Mont Blanc" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I do try to write poems that make you want to feed someone a sandwich, rescue orphans, fight a 
revolution, write a strong note of protest to the President, or surprise me with a kiss.  Long 
metaphors rich in the foliage of the Nishnabotna River Valley, as open as the sky above these 
plains.

And I cough up donuts and cows.  Little Debbie blowing the Doughboy.  Sanskrit chimichanga 
recipes.  It happens.

I couldn't believe when a local news station put me on TV for three minutes to talk up National 
Poetry Month, and I read a touching poem about spiced pork rinds, and when I got home to watch 
it on the VCR, found I spent the interview with "FUNNY POET" typed under my face, and I like being 
funny, it's a compliment, but chrissakes, not always the compliment I'm fishing for, sometimes I 
want to be dangerous, sensitive, like Shelley.

So no more cows.  I'll write about Harleys and willow trees now; I never want to drive up to the 
mall, park under the sign "Today Only: Sock Puppets And Funny Poet," so goodbye cows.

Well, one more.  I still haven't written Brenda, the escaped Australian cow running free for nine 
months until helicopters and night vision goggles and, come on, one more and that's it, no more 
Oscar Meyer Weiners, no more UNESCO Spam monuments or jitterbugging bison, just mountains 
struggled over, Salvadoran freedom fighters, your breasts like hyacinths.

When young, I wanted to be Percy Bysshe Shelley, Kermit the Frog, and Roger Rabbit.  I mean:

	"And the sunlight clasps the earth
	    And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
	  What is all this sweet work worth
	     If thou kiss not me?"

and who doesn't want to make "millions of people happy" like Kermit or hear the justification for 
love, "He makes me laugh," spoken by a Jessica Rabbit, words from a cartoonists dream sliding 
through the lips those dreams drew.  And not that I was jacking off to some bright Barbie with 
implants, it was the words saying that laughter superceded muscletone, even posture, that funny 
was somehow powerful.

But it just means you're not taken seriously.  You're the Moon Pie on the desert tray of the black 
tie dinner at that snooty French restaurant.  You're the guy who hurls on the Jamaican ambassador 
during the White House luncheon, you've got the fake arrow through your head as the poet laureate 
floats past in a smog of tweed, you're....

What?

What are you looking at me like that for?

What?