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Simple Simon Responds to Sayings of Captain Obvious

English literature tends to be wordy.
Many tricks are exceedingly dirty.

On a bright sunny day the whole sky appears bluish.
All the teachers that pray in Old Hebrew are Jewish.

The weather is always mercurial.
Some questions are strictly rhetorical.

Happenstance is serendipitous.
Alps in France are more precipitous.

Though the days go so slowly, the years fly by fast.
It’s the same in the future as was in the past.

There are a lot of new emerging voices.
Yet not so many satisfactory choices.

There is no life that comes without a tussle.
Then I shall bring along some extra muscle.

Be sure you never eat the yellow snow.
But when you gotta go, you gotta go.

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Lethal Games

A shipwreck off the coast of Madagascar
Kills fewer people than the tracks of Nascar,
And nowadays in North America
The sport engenders mass hysteria.

Around the course accomplished racers drive
And hope to cross the finish line alive,
Regardless of the damage to the car
Enabling them to be that which they are.

In Rome, the people loved the Colosseum,
Which offered them a perfect carpe diem
Where bodies torn apart, one must assume,
Left little for grave robbers to exhume.

Today, the rise of therapeutic science
Has spawned no end of traffic-injured clients
Who’ve paid the highway’s steep and heavy toll
And hope a surgeon’s art can make them whole.

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C.B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden.  Hundreds of his poems have appeared in scores of print and electronic journals out of North America, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Australia and India.  His collection, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder was published in 2013 by White Violet Press.

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4 Responses

  1. Frank Rable

    Simple Simon Responds – Feel free to point out the absurdly obvious that all humans are sometimes guilty of. But don’t you go picking on Frank Zappa, master of the poetic and musical message, exemplified by 1974 album ‘Apostrophe (‘)’. You know well enough that “yellow snow” was a metaphor for cultural norms that were indiscriminately accepted despite what was obvious. ( to him anyway) I’m sorry, I know that snow and go make a good rhyme, but come on man. Frank Zappa is an icon. You don’t want to minimize the Icon of our generation.
    Other than that, yeah, good poem.
    I liked “Lethal Games”, which linked yesteryear’s iron versus bone with today’s steel, plastic, rubber, and gasoline versus more steel, plastic, rubber, and gasoline. Different century, same thirst for blood.

    Reply
  2. Roy Eugene Peterson

    RE: Rable’s comments: I had to look up Frank Zappa. As one who reveled in rock and roll, he was no icon, except perhaps to those who loved the bizarre. Research showed he had only one top 40 hit and that was “Valley Girl” that I do not remember and perhaps never heard. The Simple Simon responses are the types of parody I love to read. “Lethal Games,” indeed.

    Reply
  3. Frank Rable

    FM radio, not AM. But now that you know where that expression originated, my work is done.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Frank, we can attack anything or anybody we want here. It’s one of the unique liberties of the SCP, and a main reason why we are read so widely around the Anglophone poetry world.

      Reply

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