— Poetry & Lyric —

Rejected Submissions to Mother Goose’s New and Improved Anthology of Classic Children’s Nursery Rhymes

Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub
And who do you think they be?
The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.
(Sounds like gay porn to me.)

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Drinking a lemon-lime rickey.
Along came a John with a long trench coat on
Who asked her, “How much for a quickie?”

A tisket, a tasket
What the fuck is a tasket?
…Or a tisket for that matter?

Jack and Jackie went to the packie
To fetch a bottle of liquor.
Jackie got horny but things became thorny
When poor Jack disrobed and she snickered.

As I was going to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives.
Turns out I made a wrong turn and ended up in Utah.

Baa baa, black sheep
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir,
But I’ll be damned if I’m giving you any. This isn’t Mother Russia, you communal asstard.

Diddle diddle dumpling,
My son Hank,
Went to bed
With a filthy skank.
He got off
With one hard spank!
Diddle diddle dumpling,
My son Hank!

Jack Sprat could eat no fat;
His wife could eat no lean.
And so betwixt the two of them
They died of malnutrition.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Were suspicious about the life insurance policy the newly widowed Mrs. Dumpty had just taken out against her husband.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With bubble buckets and hydroponics
And little buds all in a row.

It’s raining, it’s pouring,
The old man is snoring.
He bumped his head
And went to bed
And never woke up from what was officially diagnosed as a persistent vegetative state.

Old King Cole was a merry old soul,
And a merry old soul was he.
He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl,
And he got stoned out of his fuckin’ gourd.

Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,
Had a wife and loved to beat her.
He put her in a hospital
And there her rage simmered and boiled until one day, after talking with a nurse who had gone through the same thing, and tired of this feeling of overwhelming helplessness, she snuck back into the house the she and Peter had shared for ten long years and stabbed him to death with a shiv made from her hospital-issue toothbrush.