Un moine au milieu de la messe
S’eleva et cria en détresse:
« La vie religieuse,
C’est sale et affreuse! »
Et se poignarda dans les fesses. — Edward Gorey (1925-2000)
Tag Archives: limericks
Lux Legibilis
I wake from dreams and turning
My vision on the height
I scan the beacons burning
About the fields of night.
Each in its steadfast station
Inflaming heaven they flare;
They sign with conflagration
The empty moors of air.
The signal-fires of warning
They blaze, but none regard;
And on through night to morning
The world runs ruinward. — A.E. Housman in More Poems (1936)
There was a young fellow named Bright
Who travelled much faster than light.
He set off one day,
In a relative way
And came back the previous night. — Anonymous
Wails from the Crypt
From the depths of the crypt at St Giles
Came a scream that resounded for miles…
Said the vicar: “Good gracious!
Has Father Ignatius
Forgotten the Bishop has piles?”
(Anonymous)
Elsewhere other-accessible…
• Doc Proc — a review of Dr Miriam B. Stimbers’ Botty: An Unnatural History of the Backside (2014)
Lorn This Way
There was a young man of Cape Horn,
Who wished that he’d never been born;
And he wouldn’t have been,
If his father had seen
That the end of the rubber was torn.
(Possibly by Swinburne)
Proxi-Performative Post-Scriptum
The toxic title of this para-poetic post (incorporating key archaic adjective “lorn”, meaning “desolate, forsaken”) is a radical reference to core Lady Gaga single “Born This Way” (which, to the best of my recollection, I haven’t heard but have heard of…). I originally intended to call the post “Torn This Way”, but decided that this adversely and anticlimactically anticipated the punchline of the limerick.