I guess that all I have to do is read one of NoStar's parody limericks and my own parody gene gets pushed out of the ditch and onto the road. This won't be one of my best, I'm sure, but I have to try...full throttle, then...

wr ()()

(Parodist:)

She kicked off restraints
And the patience of saints
Like a branch that she struck from her face.
She made us all feel
With precocious appeal
Like quitting the whole human race.

Oh, oh, what a girl,
Exquisitely round as a pearl!
This tender young flow'r
Was so drunk with her pow'r,
In private, you'd just want to hurl!

Ms. Ehrenberg writes
Like an expert flies kites,
Or a gard'ner plants bulbs in the loam.
For once I can say
In a most honest way,
Our jokes are no match for the poem!

(Parodist and Fraysters, sotto voce:)

Moan, moan on the Fray,
Ev'ry Tuesday precisely at nine!
Just stop by the store
Even though it's a chore,
And hear us all holler and whine!

Now ladies, take heart...

(Voice over hand-held loudspeaker from offstage:)

All of you, stay right where you are!
White_Rabbit, you're under arrest for as-yet-uncommitted thought crimes!

(Parodist:)

Uncommitted what?!?

(Curtain closes on the act, leaving the audience extremely puzzled)

----------------------------

The most careless girl in the class had the most exquisite body,
the constant proximity of which exhausted us,
not least because her awkwardness,
so unlike ours, manifested itself as a license
to kick off all consciousness of her limbs
like a branch one smacks out of one's face
in the woods in an act of defiance, almost contempt,
whose ironic outcome was the deepest inhabitation
of flesh I have ever seen. It was through her body
that I wanted to pass close to the bodies of the boys.
She would take me home with her and all but throw me
into the dark dynamics of her empty-seeming household,
which I felt to be hung with heavily stitched draperies
that concealed not only the rooms but the beings inside.
She took me there and spun me into her weird intimacy
in which my own self-consciousness was a pestering
insect— stupid, negligible. She would speak to people, to men,
to anyone in the streets and walk just as quickly off,
implicating me in the desire she aroused,
her uncontainability streaking through me a blazing
trail of lights from high in the whitest part of my head
down into my lungs, my entrails,
the part of me that wasn't breathing.