Sad Limericks

[Nanohedron]

I sit here alone at my 'puter
Life stolen by that pixell'd looter
I've lots of e-friends
But that's where it ends


...God. I can't finish.

I await an arterial occluder.

Nice.

[Flyingcursor]

Yep. Party's over.

No! No! Not yet! I just got here!

Tho' I heard Flydood say, short-sighted
That this limerick party's short-nighted.
It just makes me cry
To consider that I
May not even have been invited

To render a limerick sad
Is a challenge I've never quite had
So, let's give it a shot
I'll see what I've got
Though it may simply turn out to be bad

One day, while outside it was storming,
Our puppy fell ill without warning.
The next day we awoke,
And found the poor bloke
Was hard, cold, and dead in the morning

I have never been so honored in my life!

[Denny]

Come to think of it, Hooters patrons are usually just parties of frat boys, groups of rednecks, or lonely defeated old men, so I guess the scenario would fit.

But I just don't go to Hooters

so ya just sit in the parking lot watching the traffic?

I don't even know where the local Hooters is. As for the class of patrons, c'mon. Everybody knows that.

ya got a wiki link?

[peeplj]

I ate at a Hooters for the first time with my wife and some friends last year.

I was singularly unimpressed: most of the girls had bodies like a Barbie doll (only with a much higher silicon content), and wore form-fitting suits so that their (plastic) cleavage, their face, and their hands were the only skin in sight.

You can see more skin in a underwear ad in the Sunday paper.

The food was decent but nothing to write home about.

--James

[Walden]

Looks like I may have spawned a whole new sub-genre of limericks about people born with unfortunate conditions.

[Congratulations]

Whenever Bill Evans plays "Moonlight
In Vermont" my father, his eyesight
insensate, still strains,
through blue-green refrains,
to catch a quick glimpse of cold midnight.

Meh. Hope you don't mind funny enjambment.

[Bloomfield]

Whenever Bill Evans plays "Moonlight
In Vermont" my father, his eyesight
insensate, still strains,
through blue-green refrains,
to catch a quick glimpse of cold midnight.

Meh. Hope you don't mind funny enjambment.

Enjambment is always funny. There is no way I can say it with a straight face.

I think this one is about dementia, and falls nicely into Walden's new literary niche. It's not confessional poetry, it's afflictional poetry.

[PallasAthena]

I think it is the specific cadence of the limerick that makes it hard to render one sad, in spite of the meaning of the words. It is wonderfully demonstrative of how sound the words create, and the meter and rhyme (or lack thereof), play a huge role in determining the nature of a poem.

[Innocent Bystander]

I think it is the specific cadence of the limerick that makes it hard to render one sad, in spite of the meaning of the words. It is wonderfully demonstrative of how sound the words create, and the meter and rhyme (or lack thereof), play a huge role in determining the nature of a poem.

That reminds me of the story of one of the Victorian poets exercising his skill in Classical Metre. Whether it was Browning or Longfellow (or someone else) I can't remember, but it sticks in my mind that the "Heroic" metre was unfailingly humorous in English.

[gonzo914]

I think it is the specific cadence of the limerick that makes it hard to render one sad, in spite of the meaning of the words. It is wonderfully demonstrative of how sound the words create, and the meter and rhyme (or lack thereof), play a huge role in determining the nature of a poem.

That reminds me of the story of one of the Victorian poets exercising his skill in Classical Metre. Whether it was Browning or Longfellow (or someone else) I can't remember, but it sticks in my mind that the "Heroic" metre was unfailingly humorous in English.

Perhaps, sir, you might be thinking of a work by Lewis Caroll -- Hiawatha's Photographing. This is written in the meter, in the sing-song running meter, of Longfellow's Hiawatha. Carrol did not like that meter, stating in the introduction that the meter was too easy for respectable poets --

In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of 'The Song of Hiawatha.' Having, then, distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject.

Here -- a excerpt from the poem:

FROM his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.

Note you well that even Carroll's introductory disclaimer has been written in that meter, as are all of gonzo's comments written in trochaic meter.

[Innocent Bystander]

Nope. The whole point of Longfellow's dreary epic was that it proved that there were other metres in English, which the Classicists had been steadfastly ignoring. The attempt to write in Heroic metre was proof, again ignored by the Classicists, that that style had become decadent.
Not but what Carroll's take on it wasn't worth a laugh. In fact he wrote more than one. My favourite was the one by George A Strong:

The Modern Hiawatha

He killed the noble Mudjokivis.
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.
He, to get the warm side inside,
Put the inside skin side outside.
He, to get the cold side outside,
Put the warm side fur side inside.
That's why he put the fur side inside,
Why he put the skin side outside,
Why he turned them inside outside.

[fyffer]

With so much espresso, I'm wired,
'Cause penning this verse makes me tired
But I'm kind of a jerk,
Since I'm writing at work;
If my boss finds me rhyming, I'm fired!


Yup. Can't make it sad. It always makes me chuckle, no matter what (he says, while packing boxes ...)

[Nanohedron]

so ya just sit in the parking lot watching the traffic?

I don't even know where the local Hooters is. As for the class of patrons, c'mon. Everybody knows that.

ya got a wiki link?

It occurs to me that you have an obsession with getting me to a Hooters establishment.

Give up, already.

[Denny]

I don't even know where the local Hooters is. As for the class of patrons, c'mon. Everybody knows that.

It occurs to me that you have an obsession with getting me to a Hooters establishment.

not at all....

I was just bummed that I wasn't part of everybody, is all

[Nanohedron]

I don't even know where the local Hooters is. As for the class of patrons, c'mon. Everybody knows that.

It occurs to me that you have an obsession with getting me to a Hooters establishment.

not at all....

I was just bummed that I wasn't part of everybody, is all

You ain't missin' much. I can't help it if you don't have a bigoted, knee-jerk bone in your body.