Wednesday, September 30, 2009

A to Q

Ⓐ is for AWOL, away without leave.
Ⓑ is the Bug that is eating your sleeve.

Ⓒ is for Commissar; his ways are so set, that when asked for a favor he'll always say nyet.

Ⓓ is for Dancer, who may be exotic.
Ⓔ is for Everything wild and Erotic.

Ⓕ is for Fruitcake, a Christmas Day treat.
Ⓖ is for Goldfish, much better to eat.

Ⓗ is our Hero, Charlton Heston.
Ⓘ is the organ we call our Intestine.

Ⓙ is for Jesus, the son of a Jew.
Ⓚ is for Khrushchev, who's known for his shoe.

Ⓛ is for Let; it happens in tennis.
Ⓜ is a Merchant whose home is in Venice.

Ⓝ is for Nixon; he leads our great nation.
Ⓞ is his policy: Obliteration.

Ⓟ is for Pompey, Caesar's great rival.
Ⓠ is for Quicksand, which hinders survival.

9 comments:

AJP Crown said...

This is a good format, Voidoid. Let's see if it accepts comments ...

AJP Crown said...

Oh, that was completely without problems.

empty said...

Oh, good.

I apologize for the poetry. The initial impulse to post it came from the connection between Zero and the empty set.

It was written about 40 years ago by two adolescent boys while riding on a big yellow school bus to an athletic competition. The humor is dated, almost a time capsule of clichés and concerns of the time. I do like Heston/intestine. We started spontaneously at R and after reaching Z decided to go back and fill in A-Q, but in doing so we inadvertently screwed up the metrical scheme.

AJP Crown said...

It's a very nice time capsule. I especially like tennis & Venice and 'leads our great nation' & 'obliteration', as well as the one you mentioned. i also like the circle graphics. Let's hope the other guy stayed with poetry -- you may have done too, of course, but you're known to us for the empty set.

empty said...

I don't know about poetry, but he's a hell of a writer. He writes about rock music, but that's only his jumping off point. He wrote a book.

Canehan said...

Empty,
How do I see the (I presume) beatifully illuminated initial letters of the poem, rather than boxes with numbers in them, please ?

empty said...

I got the letters from the supply of Special Characters in my Mac. At the moment I can't find them, because I'm on somebody else's (older?) Mac, which seems to have different supply of such. They weren't anything terribly special -- rather plain capital letters in -- but I was glad that A. J. Pierzynski approved.

empty said...

capital letters in circles, I meant to say

I found them again, but I don't know why you can't see them.

Nijma said...

I love the cold war Rocky and Bullwinkle feel to the rhymes. I had forgotten about Kruschev and his shoe..and Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea...

About Me

I am a professor of mathematics. (I began calling myself "Empty" or Ø when hanging around at blogs, because I am somewhat fixated on the empty set. Students and colleagues know that I can be a bit of an ancient mariner about it.)