I don't have time for "private languages" since the public ones are hard enough.

However, I once published some when my little friend Rusty died. And I think the collages Rachel assembled to illustrate some of them are spectacular.

During the 19 years I was with him, Paul introduced me to Edna St. Vincent Millay, among many other authors, whose poems he would always recite by heart. Most of her rhymes seem pretty tame today, but I still like some of it:

In our age of political correctness, superior people are supposed to apologize for being gifted. But she never agreed:

When Inez Milholland died, Edna said:

To which I would only add that it's a symphony, not a song. We each have something different to contribute.

Check out this similar poem, by Amelie Josephine Burr. I reprinted it in the Journal when Paul died, and in 2009 Rachel assembled a for it.

But when it comes to death, this poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye kind of says it all, and especially what I want people to know about me when I go away:

Since Mary never copyrighted it, it was copied hand to hand, and so there are lots of variations around. The above version is from .

When I die I don't want to be buried, and I don't see the point of being cremated. Ever since I was a little boy I've wanted to be fed to the lions at the Bronx Zoo.

See to it. If you really insist on categorizing limmericks as poetry, then I have to admit a fondness for what I call "fairy limmericks". If chess with weird pieces can be termed "fairy chess", then I guess "fairy limmericks" might include self-referentials and limmericks that rebel from strict form. On the other hand, I really, really hate Joyce Kilmer's "Trees". Not because it's a bad poem, mind you, but only because bad schoolteachers made us listen to it over and over again until we wanted to throw up, each time expecting us to swoon in delight — and expressing disappointment and disapproval when we didn't. Ironically, this also made them glow with pride because it confirmed their suspicion that we were all just a ragged bunch of street urchins compared to them. I got over what they did to Shakespeare, but not what they did to Kilmer. I got to make fun of that bad memory when a friend of mine was given a retirement luncheon and I got to read a tribute to him consisting of the same only too-familiar rhyme meter but with Joyce's sacharine words replaced by funny jibes. Okay, sometimes I like funny poems, especially Tuli Kupferberg's "Nothing", which was put to music by my friend Richard Shulberg (aka "Citizen Kafka", 1947 - 2009) and performed often by his Wretched Refuse String Band: