One Bright Morning

One Bright Morning (A Nonsense Verse)

Ladies and jellybeans, hoboes and tramps,

Cockeyed mosquitoes and bow-legged ants

Admission is free, so pay at the door

Pull up a chair and sit on the floor.

I come before you to stand behind you,

To address you, not undress you.

Ladies and gentlemen, short and stout,

I will tell you a story I know nothing about

A story that can make statues shiver:

Christopher Cucumber sailed the Miss Sloppy River

In his right hand he held the Declaration of Indigestion

In his left, the Starred-Spangled Banana

One bright morning in the middle of the night,

Two dead boys got up to fight.

One was blind and the other couldn't see,

So they chose a dummy for a referee.

Back to back they faced one another,

Drew their swords and shot each other.

A blind man went to see the fair play,

And a dumb man went to shout “Hooray!”

A deaf policeman heard the noise,

And came to arrest those two dead boys.

Now they live in the middle of the block

In an upstairs-downstairs vacant lot.

A paralyzed donkey came walking by,

And kicked the copper in the middle of the eye,

Sent him through a nine-inch wall,

Into a dry ditch and drowned them all.

A long black hearse came to cart him away,

But he ran for his life and is still gone today.

I watched from the corner of a big round table,

I the only eyewitness to the facts of my fable;

If you don't believe this lie is true,

Ask the blind man—he saw it, too.

And through a knothole in a wooden brick wall,

The man with no legs had walked away.