Repelling a kappa with a fart (Yoshitoshi)

Many years ago, when I was working for a small publisher in the high-tech trade press, I started a Friday email list to entertain the public relations people with whom I enjoyed working. It was called P.O.E.T.S. Day (Piss On Everything, Tomorrow’s Saturday), and I delivered a new doggerel “Shakespearean” sonnet in each edition.

In this re-launch of POETS Day, I’m not going to commit to originality yet, but instead will browse my stash of poetry, and throw in other poems from time to time. Let’s start with the Antisocial Sonnets, which I would offer as evidence that the new DSM should have included the ego-syntonic anti-social poetry disorder. In them I explore the various ways in which our bodily functions intersect with culture and etiquette–that being a fancy, ex post facto academoid way of saying you’re about to experience poetry whose subject matter appeals in particular to eight year old boys.

Antisocial Sonnet #1

Party Pooper
(A meditation following a party at which bean dip was served)

Innocuous to sight, the common bean’s
An unassuming legume, but beware
This vegetable is more than what it seems,
A fearfully explosive gastric snare.
For locked within its gently curving shell
Are sugars, a bacterial delight,
Whose joyful ferment generates a smell
And sound that panics all your friends to flight.
So when the next one makes your trousers flap,
Just look around, so innocent, “Who me?
It was the dog,” you’ll say, “or else, mayhap
A Rocky Mountain Barking Spider, see?”
To no avail: they’ll throw you out the door
And make you swear off beans forevermore.