Sonorous Insult

(after Robert Desnos)

 

I spit in the eye
of the father of the bride
of the blacksmith who made the axe
with which the lumberjacks
cut down the big old oak
with a hundred lusty strokes
and which they split in half
and from which the bed was carved
(with a swag of fruit and leaves)
in which the fellow was conceived
who became the great-grandfather
of the guy with the massage parlor
where, provocatively clad,
your mother met your dad.

 

Author's Note

Witty, artistic and very good with words, the surrealist poet Robert Desnos was the archetype of the young Jewish intellectual-about-town in 1930s Paris. After the German occupation of 1940, he was sent to a concentration camp (see photo). He didn't survive.