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I need to write a funny poem on displacement...any ideas?


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Learn techniques from:

"The Night of the Living Dead":
by Ed Ochester

Like a parasitic insect, stealthy Jesus
lays his eggs at the base of their skulls
and they hatch, raven through
the medulla, cerebellum and
the cerebrum: they are "saved,"
they are "blissful," they are
"born again." They wear galoshes,
they have sex only for procreation,
they are unemployed, they are
bound for glory because
they know one thing
(the only thing to know)
and they want to give it to you.

They are gathered this evening
before your door to offer tracts,
they are restrained, they don't
like to touch themselves, they
are standing here today quietly
though they burned Jews, though they
stoned heretics, though they inserted
flaming pokers into the anuses
of homosexuals.

The poem's opening strategy overturns polite discourse with a vengeance. Title and first line collude to extend the reader's guilty pleasure at the forbidden joke/metaphor: Jesus is "stealthy," a parasitic insect pumping eggs of narrow-mindedness into the skulls of believers, who then become evangelical Christian horror-movie zombies bent on attack. "L'humour veritable est sinister, melancholique, macabre, c'est-a-dire: noir," playwright Eugene Ionesco once asserted — "True humor is sinister, melancholy, macabre, that is to say: black" The Land of Cockaigne plays all of those notes, in a tone that blurs and disrupts the boundaries between traditional categories of tragedy and comedy, melodrama and satire. And, I would add, in the hybrid genres they create: the gothic comedy, for example, or the tragic farce. That hybridization creates the perfect growing medium for Ochester's black comedy in "The Night of the Living Dead": the very people who believe they can save us will bring us horror and harm.
"The Night of the Living Dead" seethes, but its pacing is comic. Ochester uses rapid-fire comma splices, tightly consistent line length, enjambment, and syntactical repetition — in this case, "they" and "though" clauses — to carry tone. The effect is a snowballing indictment of hypocrisy which grows in intensity, even as the speaker returns to the comic punctuation of lines we know are facetious: "They're restrained, they/ know God,"

they would like to tear
your arms from your sockets, they
are waiting until the world is dark enough
to tear the flesh from your thighs.
**
Good read and good luck