In Your Face Poems

In Your Face Poems

Joseph S. Salemi

Copyright © 2005 by Joseph S. Salemi


Published by The New Formalist Press


XHTML & CSS design by Leo Yankevich

On a Workshopped Poem

How nice! You’ve seen to every single thing.
Congratulations on your deft removal
Of any phrase that might offend or sting
The consciousness of Those Who Grant Approval.

There is no word disparaging or vicious;
No heinous hint of ethnic derogation.
Your verse is free from anything suspicious
Like thought or wit or humorous deflation.

You’ve excised terms insensitive and callous,
All slurs, invective, insult, and aspersions.
You’ve stayed away from vulva and from phallus
(We do not sanction those obscene diversions).

Indeed, you’ve labored long and hard. And now
Your poem is as placid as a cow.

Choosing a Thermometer

If tubes hypoglottal
Can cause you to throttle,
And things in your ears
Breed irrational fears,
And under your armpits
Occasion for harm sits,
While probes in your nose
May precipitate flows,
Then you I expect’ll
Most likely want rectal.

A Job Interview at the English Department

They’re troubled that you lecture to the class.
You answer: “Students do not know a thing—
When dealing with a freshman who’s an ass
You can’t expect him suddenly to bring
Sharp insight to the study of a text.”
The Chair harrumphs and shuffles up some papers;
The others seem intolerably vexed
As if they had dyspepsia, or vapors.

A harridan from Women’s Studies asks
If you’re committed to transgendered readings.
You smile, and say the class has major tasks
And no time for such trivial proceedings.
They all looked pained, but someone keeps his cool
And thanks you for your visit to the school.

The Fates Give Oedipus a Consolation Prize

Oedipus, Oedipus, it won’t be said of us
That we abandoned you, blinded and frail.
Say that you’re sorry for banging your mommy
And we’ll set you up with some fabulous tail.
Sure, you can’t see her, but that’s immaterial—
You can still function like any good male.
In order to expedite amorous pleasantries
We’ve had her undies embroidered in Braille.

What Should Have Happened

She screamed when he sat down beside her,
That affably courteous spider.

So wounded in pride and offended,
He went to an ape he’d befriended.

Describing her rudeness, he shivered.
The ape in revenge then delivered

One helluva bone-crunching buffet
To prissy-faced Little Miss Muffet.

From Hesiod

Cronus, while his dad was screwing,
Took a scythe and did some hewing.
Daddy’s balls and pecker tumbled—
The old man’s pride was duly humbled.

His genitals fell in the ocean
Where the whitecaps’ choppy motion
Whipped them to a fine parfait:
The goddess of erotic play.

And that’s how Aphrodite starts—
Foam churned up from private parts.

The New Third Reich

The Belgians, with their beer and clogs—
A perfect blend of Krauts and Frogs.
They pass their laws and flex their muscles
High up on a perch in Brussels.

To an Earsplitting Unitarian Chapel Choir

Full-throated, loud, big-bottomed female choir
Thundering in a menopausal key,
Whose earnest hymns swell upwards, ever higher,
Above a pew-renting liberal bourgeoisie,
Rapt in triumphant vagueness, you aspire
To be a church while leaving all thought free;
You hunger for that transcendental fire
(Though without Virgin, Saints, or Papacy).

Half the assembly’s atheist, and dreams
Of no fulfillment beyond earthly life;
Each week the minister concocts new schemes
Involving power, money, someone’s wife.
When your religion is a mere charade
Hymns should be less emphatic, and more staid.

The Reformation

Luther took a massive shit;
Zwingli got a whiff of it.
Then he wrote the Saxon friar
To express his righteous ire:
“I can’t stand your German turd—
I like Calvin’s Gallic merde!”

Back from Wittenberg there came
This rebuttal to the same:
“Listen, you obnoxious Swiss—
The stink is stronger when I piss.
As for spreading crap around,
Anabaptists win, hands down.”

Supply and Demand

The fleet’s at anchor in the harbor;
Sailors disembark from starboard,
Three months’ wages in their britches
Plus some unattended itches.
Ladies who are cute and willing
Are really gonna make a killing.

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