NOBODY COULD EVER CON EDISON!
When Grandma was home
With her grammaphone
And an apple pie meant for the oven...
When Sis and her boyfriend were intent on lovin,'
Not by the moon's full crescent,
But by a light incandescent...
When Father was working outside
To harness electrical juices
And didn't get fried
Because of some safety fuses...
When Mother turned down the lights
To perform her pagan rites...
When Brother got in a jam
That ended him up in jail
And his parents by telegram
Were able to post his bail...
When Auntie, the hypochondriac,
Was last seen
Chewing upon a Big Mac
In her heart-and-lung machine...
When uncle, named Cheap Joe
Spent his quarters at tonight's peepshow...
When the family all sacked out
At night with no blackout
To melt the ice in the fridge
Even a smidge...
The donor of all these fulfillments,
Yes, the pharmacist who pushed this good medicine,
Was King of the Filaments,
Thomas Alva Edison.
WHERE DID CARRIE NATION CARRY THE NATION?
Bartenders would quake
To their roots
And shake
In their boots
When Carrie would choose
To enter their saloons and bars
And to accost their booze
(Nicely stored in bottles and jars).
Why did the purveyors of hootch
Tremble so mooch?...
'Cuz she had a hatchet
To smash it.
NOW WHO'S DEAD, FRED?
The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche's
Was basically: "To each his
Own..."
(But "your own,"
If you are weak
Is limited in tone
To turning the other cheek).
Nietzsche's writings would condone
Forced mastery of some super-duperman
Over every other worm-like human also-ran.
The identity of this superhuman beast
Who lords it over all the rest of us
Cannot be "God," since God is long deceased...
"God is dead,"
Said Fred,
"And only ever was a symbol for the best in us."
If we can't look to heaven
For projected supermen,
Looking to Nietzsche himself is worse than bad:
He spent the last eleven
Years of life inside the loony bin,
Staring into space, stark raving mad.
MARY BAKER AND HER SPIRITUAL EDDY.
Mary Baker, as a child,
Was frail.
That is, bacteria piled
Up inside her and made her pale.
It doesn't take too much speculation
To imagine each and every painful inoculation...
So perhaps the black-and-blue contusions
Caused by many medical appliances
Drove her to spiritual transfusions
And to the Christian Sciences.
Hence the cosmic truth that she embraced:
A spirit is a terrible thing to waste...
Particularly when it's oddly
Conjoined with your average body.
Mary Baker Eddy
Held steady
And did just fine
Until the age of 89.
My computer must be quite fond of her:
It just flashed her name on my Christian Science Monitor.