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Hear now a curious dream I dreamed last night,
Each word whereof is weighed and sifted truth.

  I stood beside Euphrates while it swelled
Like overflowing Jordan in its youth:
It waxed and colored sensibly to sight,
Till out of myriad pregnant waves there welled
Young crocodiles, a gaunt blunt-featured crew,
Fresh-hatched perhaps and daubed with birthday dew.
The rest if I should tell, I fear my friend,
My closest friend, would deem the facts untrue;
And therefore it were wisely left untold;
Yet if you will, why, hear it to the end.

  Each crocodile was girt with massive gold
And polished stones, that with their wearers grew:
But one there was who waxed beyond the rest,
Wore kinglier girdle and a kingly crown,
Whilst crowns and orbs and sceptres starred his breast.
All gleamed compact and green with scale on scale,
But special burnishment adorned his mail,
And special terror weighed upon his frown;
His punier brethren quaked before his tail,
Broad as a rafter, potent as a flail.
So he grew lord and master of his kin:
But who shall tell the tale of all their woes?
An execrable appetite arose,
He battened on them, crunched, and ****** them in.
He knew no law, he feared no binding law,
But ground them with inexorable jaw:
The luscious fat distilled upon his chin,
Exuded from his nostrils and his eyes,
While still like hungry death he fed his maw;
Till every minor crocodile being dead
And buried too, himself gorged to the full,
He slept with breath oppressed and unstrung claw.
O marvel passing strange which next I saw:
In sleep he dwindled to the common size,
And all the empire faded from his coat.
Then from far off a winged vessel came,
Swift as a swallow, subtle as a flame:
I know not what it bore of freight or host,
But white it was as an avenging ghost.
It levelled strong Euphrates in its course;
Supreme yet weightless as an idle mote
It seemed to tame the waters without force
Till not a murmur swelled or billow beat:
Lo, as the purple shadow swept the sands,
The prudent crocodile rose on his feet
And shed appropriate tears and wrung his hands.

  What can it mean? you ask. I answer not
For meaning, but myself must echo, What?
And tell it as I saw it on the spot.
Jelena Apr 2020
There is no line so no punchline
And no punishment for the punny puns
Since they are no punks
They are not puny, right
There are other that is punier puns
Was bored and I love puns
Ron Sanders Jan 2020
THE BIG WHEEL

Stop! Think.

IN INFINITY EVERYTHING REDUCES TO NOTHING:
The heavens a mist, your God a blip,
all existence a freak of light and shadow.
Nothing is punier than arrogance.

This is a clockwork universe. Yet it has no Mainspring,
measures only instantaneousness in perpetuity.
Providence or circumstance—can all this radiance, receding,
simply vanish into nought…
The big wheel turns the lesser wheels;
the lesser wheels, the stars.
The stars roll round those starving hearts
their greater wheels have wrought.

Galaxies fling their bristles wide,
spattering flame on a canvas boundless, artless,
imponderable. Within these wheels a prodigy quests,
spinning in pitch and timelessness,
forever falling round a warm mother sun.

My world is staggeringly beautiful.

In evening she murmurs, post-mourning she sings.
Her heart is all creation, her hearth a planet wide.
Each tremor of birthing, each strumming of wings,
aches to the rhythms of season and tide:  leaves follow sun,
winds scatter rain. Streams rush to bed, to the lullaby of sea.
You blood or brine or fluke or fate—
Is this one sweet fire just one more torch in passing.
The heavens yawn above us, the clockwork shrinks below…
in molecules are…galaxies becoming…
greater, lesser, up and down:  all things bend to math and mind.
Yet,
in Infinity,
Everything adds up to—

NOTHING!

Chimeras breed in peepholes,
where tiny wheels are wrought.
These wee wheels spin their smaller wheels;
the smaller wheels, the jots.
The jots chum from the mocking depths,
and vanish into nought…

— The End —