The Red Jester (Jan Van Beers), Sonnet #476

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My Human Disguise.

“Now, my dears, keep watching the ace.

My favorite card — it has no face

And just one itty bitty heart.

Hee, hee! It can’t squeak out a fart

The way the queen of spades

Will call to her some dainty maids

To please her king of diamonds

With one who has a showbiz mons.

Now, see? Your lazy eyes don’t peel

On the ace! It has disappeared!

Where’d it go? It’s as I feared,

Some joker has stolen the deal.

Why, that’s me! I rule the whole deck.

Every card’s at my call and beck!”

Alexander Confronts The Headless People (The Talbot Shrewsbury Book), Sonnet #469

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here:
My Human Disguise.





A tyrant seeks with tongue or sword to erase

In his conquests every other race

But his own, put defenders to the chase.

He doesn’t have to kill to cut off heads;

He can speak black words of hatred instead.

By doing so, his voice, his anger, bled

Of honor, leaves him only his blunt spear

To throw blindly at what he thinks is fear,

As one by one his soldiers disappear.

The “headless” ones begin to speak of truth

With the insight and energy of youth,

And refuse to accept their headless state:

The tyrant himself, mumbling, twitting, “great,”

And nothing left beneath his balding pate.

Little Owl (Durer), Sonnet #392

Encore! Let’s sing out with an “o” vowel!

I know of a man like a leetle owl,

Draped head to tail with a golden cowl.

They say he even has a golden bowel

He fills with gophers caught on the prowl.

A kingly bird, his perch a small dowel,

He clears out his cage with a dirty towel.

All that work’s left him with a flappy jowl,

His chirps sounding like a whispered growl.

He’s known to hate the consonant avowal

Unless it leads to a follower’s howl

Of pain or his latest conquest’s yowl

Of pleasure, though that tends to make him scowl.

You choose. As a fowl is he fair or foul?

The Narmer Palette (3,000 B.C.), Sonnet #327

It's said Pharaoh spoke in twittering rhyme

Due to his lacking a crucial enzyme,

Because he ate off of a golden plate

What he'd repeatedly regurgitate.

His crown was golden too, a heavy weight

He wore a rug beneath to soothe his pate.

He smote his enemies with a scepter,

A wand of lead he called his "preemptor."

He had a single rigid policy:

"I'll destroy you before you can hurt me."

That was more than five thousand years ago.

This palette is all that's left of Pharaoh.

They say he ruled a united Egypt,

Leaving nothing not ravaged, empty, or stripped.