01Feb / 2017

2017 metamorphosism.com St. Valentine’s Day Limerick Contest

Welcome to the 2017 edition of the metamorphosism.com International Limerick Contest.
Please leave your entries in the comments to this post.
Enter as often as you like.
This year’s theme: CURRENT EVENTS, plus bonus themes to be added as the contest progresses
All participants, new and seasoned veterans, are encouraged to consult the combined FAQ/rules below BECAUSE THEY CHANGE WHILE THE CONTEST IS GOING ON.
No one knows why.
FAQ/Rules

Does it have to be a limerick? YES. This is strictly enforced, and non-limericks will not be accepted. Google proper limerick form if you are not sure.
How do I enter? POST YOUR ENTRY OR ENTRIES in the comments to this post. Click on comment, or whatever is down there, and add a new comment.
When is the deadline? THE DEADLINE is 14 February 2017
Do you mean 12 midnight on the night of the 13th or midnight on the night of the 14th? And which time zone shall have seisin of jurisdiction? We have had considerably confusion in the past! NINE AM (CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME) 14 February 2017.
Oh by the way, I have a Quince tree on Cranes Lane. I think I should get a multiplier for that fact. No, sorry, that was last year. Secret multiplier in place.
Is there a prize? NOT YET but that might change.
Is there a limit to how often I can enter? NO. Enter as often as you like. The more often you enter, the better your chances.
HOWEVER ONLY ORIGINAL ENTRIES ARE ACCEPTED. PLAGIARISM RESULTS IN DISQUALIFICATION. No exceptions made for members of the First Family.
Can entries be bawdy? YES, absolutely. These are limericks, they can be bawdy, gross, you name it. It’s not required, but it is in the nature of the genre. ALSO: this is for St. Valentine’s Day so points awarded for love/romance/sex-related poetry.
Complaints will be deleted. There is no avenue of appeal. Decisions of the judges are final. Be nice, and have fun, and don’t take this too seriously.
Is there anything else I can do to be deleted? Yes. Besides complaints, anything else that is not a limerick will also be deleted, especially anything remotely similar to trolling, nastiness or disagreeing with me. That will get you deleted, and whatever else our technicians here can think up. This is meant to be a fun, light-hearted, non-political past-time.
Let’s see, what else? Oh yes.
Bonus points are awarded for inclusion of themes listed below (No limit to how many themes you may include, the more the better):
Last-minute addition: Scottish insults (particularly in combination with USAmerican politics..)
Current events i.e. tacky kakistocracy, apocaplexia, alternative facts, ~~Trump,~~ etc etc etc think of it as catharsis.
~~Use of the phrase “tacky kakistocracy” or something even better~~
Utopian visions
Musical genres (see here for ideas, thanks Carola!)
Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, William Gibson et al
Field dependence vs field independence
Quantum theory
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
William S. Burroughs
Funeral planning
(More themes to come, watch this space.)

By entering you grant metamorphosism.com permission to publish your entry electronically on metamorphosism.com, in social media (including but not limited to twitter.com, facebook.com and anything else) as well as in book form, although the latter is REALLY unlikely, without compensation (this is a non-profit venture, and any possible, although unlikely, book would be, you know, for charity most likely).
AS ALWAYS, RULES ARE SUBJECT TO CONSTANT CHANGE DURING THE CONTEST, SO CHECK BACK OFTEN.

Now, get cracking.

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20Jan / 2017

My banana is freezing

What are you doing for the inauguration?
I broke into my own house. I forgot my keys at work, and the cats were locked in the house and hungry, and the organic vegetable delivery was outside behind the house, and it is freezing cold now, and driving back to work to get the keys would have taken 90 minutes so I had to figure out a better plan.
So I asked myself, WWMWTMTD?
What would my wife tell me to do?
So I broke in.
I’m not going to say how, maybe a burglar is reading this. It took me about 2 minutes; Gamma used to do it when she was in grade school and forgot her keys somewhere so it’s either not exactly hard or Gamma and I are natural burglars.
I figure a professional burglar could do it in way less time than that.
Then I fed the cats and got the vegetables into the house and ate some organic fruit.
My banana was freezing (not a euphemism).
Later I will give old red cat his dementia pill.
Other red cat gets antibiotics daily. I wrap those pills in bacon.
Bacon is his favorite.
They are easy to remember because he gets them every day.
Old red cat gets his once every two days, so I get mixed up and forget to give him his dementia pills, which is ironic, LOL.
He either sleeps or stares at his water dish, so it’s hard to tell if they’re helping.
Right now he’s sleeping, and I hate to wake him up to give him a pill.

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18Jan / 2017

Sources

The original plan was
to make this a text where
a historical event shed
metaphorical light
on a current situation
or condition
but minimal research
made it clear that one
had nothing to do
with the other.

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12Jan / 2017

I hear the train a comin’

Last night my wife and I were in Japan, sitting on a tatami-mat floor, singing “Folsom Prison Blues” with Johnny Cash, who also played an acoustic guitar he kept in a cardboard box.
I didn’t know the lyrics so I tried to fake it.
Someone asked why Johnny Cash was in Japan, someone else said it had to do with his wife.
This was better than the dream I had a couple nights earlier, a long dream in which nothing happened, I was just dead.
I think that dream was inspired by spending an evening in our cellar looking through a pile of paper trash I had dumped out of a full garbage can.
Everything was in there, from Christmas wrapping paper to letters from long-dead relatives and printouts of emails from the 1990s.
I was looking for money someone had received for Christmas and then couldn’t find after we’d cleaned up.
I never found the money, so we’ll find it somewhere else, or not, but at least we know we didn’t throw it away in our housecleaning frenzy.
I found other stuff, though.
I found a eulogy my then-eight-year-old daughter had written for the funeral of a family friend – we looked everywhere for that eulogy and gave up years ago on ever finding it. And there it was – together with a picture of our friend.
Our friend was beautiful and brilliant and loved her children fiercely.
I found love notes and cards I had written my daughters when they were little and I was still doing calligraphy.
It was a little overwhelming, sorting through all this stuff I had forgotten (I did calligraphy?). Most of it went back into the garbage can.
I saved only a few things, like an ancient note from my wife warning me that our cat (now long-dead, although he lived to be 20) was pissing on everything so that’s why the St. Nicholas shoes were by everyone’s beds instead of at the front door. (Cats have always been pissing in our house! I thought it was just a brand-new crisis! That took the edge off it somehow.)
So much happened. So much forgotten.
So I dreamed I was dead.
It was a similar feeling, sorting through a binload of lost memories.
That ghostly feeling.

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24Nov / 2016

Thanksgiving

I am thankful for my wife and kids and the rest of my family, and all of you, and for this awesome planet of ours, not to mention universe and the sciences, which are really great sciences, the best.

And the arts, seriously.

This year, I am additionally thankful for our new post-fact society, thanks to which I am now extremely handsome and funny, not to mention smart and – surprise! – long legged and adorned with a sixpack and giant schlong. My hair is not thinning, and the hearing aids are a thing of the past.

Now, when strangers see me on the street, they think Most Interesting Man in the World, and not Santa Claus or Kenny Rogers.

Thanks to our post-fact society, I light my cigars with $50 bills and my cigars are from Cuba, my friend, because I am alt-rich or something.

Thanks to our post-fact society, limousines slow down in the street so their passengers can lean out the window and give me high-fives and bouncers give me fist bumps.

Now, global warming is a business opportunity, not terraforming for aliens who swim in acid and breathe carbon.

Now, there’s enough for everyone, as long as they’re not lazy.

Thanks to post-fact society, everything’s great again.

Everything.

Just great. Thanks to whoever invented this!

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03Nov / 2016

Some days Omi is just on the floor

Some days it is a crow wanting your lunch, and some days it is a Slovak home care lady wanting you to help get Omi onto the toilet.
Some days the rain stops and it clears up and you take a walk through golden leaves, buy lotto tickets and salty fruit-nut mix (with rhubarb pieces), take pictures of the sky and the roads are quiet, abandoned, and the sidewalks empty except for a crazy man screaming and another crazy man slinking back and forth up the street and, later, a small lady you cross the street to avoid because you try not to scare women if possible.
Some days the small lady crosses the street too, though, back over to meet you, and walks up to you and asks for help and you realize she had been on the street looking for help but the street was empty but for you.
And you say, sure, what do you need?
I need you to help me get Omi back up. I dropped Omi. There’s nobody else in the house and no one else on the street.
She just slipped through my hands and I (here she gestures to herself, a gesture that emphasizes her lack of size) am small. Too small to pick her back up.
Ok, you say. Sure. You follow her into the house, one of the mansions that line the street. Briefly you think, there could be robbers.
No, vampires.
If you were a vampire and got hungry during the daytime, you’d ask your minion to go invite someone into the house.
You imagine David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve inside the house.
She ushers you up the stairs and into an apartment and into the living room and you wonder, how does one lift an old woman in a hospital gown with no pants on without hurting her or her dignity or your back?
You take one side and the helper takes the other side and you try to do what she does and you get Omi onto the toilet, which is a chair with a cut-out part for a bedpan.
You aren’t sure how much of what is going on Omi understands, to what proportions she is confused or mortified or flustered or resigned or what.
The helper thanks you and you step around the diaper and wish them a nice day.
The streets are still empty, still no crows, all the way back to the office, not a one, nor a dog.

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13Oct / 2016

I’m automatically be it’s like a magnet

Here is what I did: I took the lyrics of two Tangerine Dream (random choice of band) songs (“Loved by the Sun” and “Kiev Mission” (no special reason)) and the NYT transcript of some things D0n4ld Trump said that recently became notorious and mashed them up in the Hay Kraynen Markov text generator.

I then spent minimal time cleaning up the text (sometimes it gets a little bit mangled in a Markov text generator). Those of you with synthesizers are welcome to use this for your next recording project. If you do, please send me a copy.

Only lightning strikes all the seasons
(spoken) Melania said this was down one of us as a date.

Who sing her, it’s, it’s here, come on shorty.
I’m automatically be it’s like a magnet.
Just kissing her.
You know and forever
Loved
Whoa.

I did try and I moved by the meeting them.
It’s hot as shit. In the good in man, yeah,
that’s, it’s still very beautiful — I just start kissing them.
It’s totally be in my microphone.
It’s some Tic Tacs just start
Legends can be now and (completed)
To be absorbed in the good
if you had to take one of us as a beautiful.

Look at the way, honey. Oh, good.
Hello, how are you.
Terrific. You know, that’s better.
This is much better not be they had a reach for goodness sake
Legends can be now and two go do our show.
Oh, you want.
Grab ’em by the start

You knows
Message
Communicating with friends
To exchange views
Boundlessness
Maybe it’s her. With the bus.
Bushy, Bushy.
Hello, nice co-star here.
Yes, absolutely.
Good.
Continent
Future
World
(that is torn apart

Legends can be now and forever
Teaching spells
Only light. Here we good in man.
Yeah, let’s, it’s like a right there is much between one.
make a right. Here we go.
Make meeting of all that’s a different one.
It better.
This always good legs.

No, no, Nancy. No, it’s better.
Now, if you. How are you? Pleasure right, you are a start
In the wise, there
World
(that’s singing
Hand in the gold. I don’t get in the music of all of love’s eternity
Whose shines so bright
The thought reader knows
Message
Communicating of youth, was married. Then all right
Hand in thought there is the middle.
It’s, it look.

She used to be a soap star,
thank you. Terrific.
You know and with friends can be now got off
the meet you when you’re a pussy.
You know and for good in man, yeah.
Oh, good.
Come on, Billy. You know, she was married.

Two and the bus.
Bushy, Bushy? I just start kissing all the handle.
Let the beginning is at the little hug, darling?
O.K., absolutely.
Good, that’s better.

This is the seasons
Only lightning strikes all the seasons
Legends can be now and even wait.
You know, she’re ready to loved by the seasons

Look at the mystics plays it’s cards
all of all I can see is hope the Fifth on that
is the little guy in?
How you do it. You knows
Boundlessness
Message
Communicating with friends
To exchange views
Boundlessness

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