Bluto, the world’s strongest man, could tear bread loaf-sized pieces off a steel-belted tractor tire with his bare hands.

But he could not lift a single smithereen of his sensitive Piscean heart when Lily, the luscious, leggy Leo trapeze artist, left him for steely-eyed Arien Karl, the literate and literary lion tamer.

Horoscopic Circus, Act II

She was a Cancer Dragon. Like catnip to the Piscean Tiger, whose feline DNA was his Achilles heel. Especially when she wore heels. And nylons. The end is nylon, he thought. I love you she said. I love you more he affirmed. And firm he soon became. Then being the ringmaster, she opened her mouth and incinerated him -- as only dragons can….

(20 minute poetry)

Popeyed
I look at the goil with the olive complexion
and the ink drips like oil from the well of my fountain
pen.

It was always the goil that Bluto desired as Wimpy ate burgers
looking awfully tired.

Though Popeyed I tried
to make Bluto see
that the goil in question
was the goil for me.

Lliving a cartoon is like life on the moon where there's no air to breathe, but being here where the atmosphere is rare unlike the burgers that Wimpy won't share
is fine.

The goil is mine and if I eats my spinach there will come a time
when I knock
Bluto out.

(It always sounds like goil to me when Popeye says it.

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
- W. B. Yeats:  The Second Coming

Dachshund

Bred to burrow after badgers,
what's he doing here?

Terrorizing the underwear
behind my couch.

Is he a true hund,
or just a pan-fried sausage
with a Bluto chest?

I wonder what they called him
back then, in the Black Forest,
when dogs were dogs.

Tracker? Hunter?
Try: Baron Von Putt-Putt Tootsie Roll.

I'm Scot myself.
My people once sacked York.

No, this isn't York.
It's Plano, Texas.

Don't think a Dachshund and a Scot
can't sack Dallas from here.

Until then, we play our little game:
What rough ****** slouches toward my underwear?