The other day (as opposed to today) I was sitting
by my seameant pond re-reading Judson Jerome’s
The Poet’s HandBook refreshing myself on
accentual meter to prepare for a project commissioned
by the University of Texas at Austin. They pay
their football coach millions but they can only
pay me 10,000 pesos to translate Beowulf into
Esperanto. Anyway, I ran into the shortest poem
of all time, FLEAS, which I will quote later
with a couplet of my own making, of course.

So before God created woman, Adam used to lie
around watching aforementioned football games on TV,
eating whatever fruit fell to the ground, taking
a bite of whichever animal wandered by, he’d
scratch himself, he’d play with his dog even
though the dog had just licked his dog balls.
He was, in other words, a content, lazy slob.
But then God created woman and Adam had
to clean up his act.


Fleas

Adam
had ‘em.
Eve
forbade ‘em.