I'd prefer Some Linguine

Its virtues have been elsewhere sung,
But still I shun the meal of tongue.
Corned beef, pastrami—fine, those two,
But, eating tongue, the tongue tastes you.




Complete and Accurate Transcription of a Passionate Verbal Exchange between the Roman God Jupiter and His Human Lover Io, Written Totally Sincerely I Swear but Also, to Be Perfectly Honest, with Half an Eye (ouch?) Toward Snatching the Admittedly-Dubious and Unquestionably Trivial “Shortest Poem” Title from Ogden Nash (whose famous [and variously attributed, likely apocryphal] couplet, “Fleas,” or, as it is occasionally titled, “On the Antiquity of Microbes,” reads in its glorious entirety “Adam / had ’em.”) and/or Muhammad Ali (who, while not by vocation a poet, memorably recited during a 1975 speech at Harvard the following “poem” consisting of only two words, two syllables, and only four letters, two being identical: “Me / We”), despite which This Poem Is Presented Wholly and Totally as a Genuine Effort Believed to Meet the Normal Standards of Quality, Drawing as Its Inspiration the Enduring Classical Tale of One of the Many Loves of Jove, in Particular that Version of the Greek Myth as Recorded in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, yet Simultaneously Generally Remarking on the Commonplace Theological and Mythographical Trope of the Divine and the Mortal Meeting, an Alien Interaction Frought with the Metaphysical Possibility of Death or Harm by Sheer Revelation on the Part of the All Too Human Party Witnessing for the First and Only Time the True and Unmasked Face of Divinity, which Has Been in the Relevant Literature Resulted either in No Such Case at All (Id Est, Europa), or Very Much So in One (Exempli Gratia, Semele), Drawing Additional Inspiration in Form from the Beautiful and “Transitional” Minimalist Typographical-Visual Poems of Aram Saroyan, Geof Huth, and jwcurry, among Many Others, and Drawing Additional Inspiration in Content from Those Old-Fashioned Designs of On-Off Switches, You Know What I Mean, the Kind Where It Isn’t Just One Button with a Circle-and-Line Symbol on It, That Turns the Thing Off and On, but the Kind Where It Has a One on One Side and a Zero on the Other, Representing the On State and the Off State, but, I Personally Believe, Further Providing a Beautiful Illustration of a Commonplace Dichotomy or Duad, Contrasted with the Fact that Modern Post-Fregean Logics, Quantum Theory, and Society Are Just Now (Just Now, in Terms of Progress, Referring to the Last Century or So) Beginning to Accept Non-Binary Truth Values, Electronic Bits, and Identities where Previously had Existed a Discrete Dualism, Although Noting Very Significantly that the Poem’s Two Halves, when Read Together as One, May Still Be Read to Represent Any Number of Other Things, Such as the Ubiquitous Jewish and/or British Interjection Generally Transcribed “Oi!” or (In Variant) “Oy!”, the Aforementioned Boviform or Theriomorphic (To Employ First the Latin, Second the Greek) Lover of Zeus (Or, to Employ the Same Latin, Jove) and, by the Same Y-for-I Substitution as Above, Another Interjection, “Yo!”, Not Forgetting, Lastly, that This Brilliant and Original Poem Also Echoes Two of the Three One-Letter Words in the English Language, Either or Both of which Might Easily Have Been Uttered in the Situation of the Mythological Tableau Called to Mind

i - o

Daniel Galef


If you have any comments on either of these poems, Daniel Galef would be pleased to hear from you.