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Unable to determine who owns the copyrights for these Morris Bishop poems, but it is probably Random House. I recall seeing "How to Treat Elves" in This is My Best Humor, edited by Bennett Cerf, published around the mid 1950s. Will update this when I can locate correct information.

"How To Treat Elves"

I met an elf man in the woods,
The wee-est little elf!
Sitting under a mushroom tall--
'Twas taller than himself!

"How do you do, little elf," I said,
"And what do you do all day?"
"I dance 'n fwolic about," said he,
"'N scuttle about and play;"

"I s'prise the butterflies, 'n when
A katydid I see,
'Katy didn't' I say, and he
Says 'Katy did!' to me!

"I hide behind my mushroom stalk
When Mister Mole comes froo,
'N only jus' to fwighten him
I jump out'n say 'Boo!'

"'N then I swing on a cobweb swing
Up in the air so high,
'N the cwickets chirp to hear me sing
'Upsy-daisy-die!'

"'N then I play with the baby chicks,
I call them, chick chick chick!
'N what do you think of that?" said he.
I said, "It makes me sick.

"It gives me sharp and shooting pains
To listen to such drool."
I lifted up my foot, and squashed
The God damn little fool.
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E = MC2

What was our trust, we trust not,
What was our faith, we doubt;
Whether we must or not
We may debate about.
The soul, perhaps, is a gust of gas
And wrong is a form of right-
But we know that Energy equals Mass
By the Square of the Speed of Light.

What we have known, we know not,
What we have proved, abjure.
Life is a tangled bowknot,
But one thing still is sure.
Come, little lad; come, little lass,
Your docile creed recite:
"We know that Energy equals Mass
By the Square of the Speed of Light."
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Morris Bishop
American linguist
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The words of a living language are like creatures: they are alive. Each word has a physical character, a look and a personality, an ancestry, an expectation of life and death, a hope of posterity.
Good Usage, Bad Usage, and Usage" in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1969

The Naughty Preposition

Once I lost a preposition.
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair.
And angrily, I cried, "Perdition!
Up from out of in under there!"

Correctness is my vade mecum,
And dangling phrases I abhor.
But still I wonder, what should he come
Up from out of in under for?
The New Yorker, 1947
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Song of the Pop-Bottlers

Pop bottles, pop-bottles
in pop shops;
The pop-bottles Pop bottles
Poor Pop drops

When Pop drops pop-bottles
Pop-bottles plop!
Pop-bottle-tops topple!
Pop mops slop!

Stop! Pop'll drop bottle!
Stop, Pop stop!
When Pop bottles pop-bottles,
Pop-bottles pop!
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The limerick is furtive and mean;
You must keep her in close quarantine,
Or she sneaks to the slums
And promptly becomes
Disorderly, drunk and obscene.
----------------------------------------

WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE

I think I remember this moorland,
The tower on the top of the tor;
I feel in the distance another existence:
I think I have been here before.

And I think you were sitting beside me,
In a fold in the face of the fell,
For Time at its work'll go round in a circle,
And what is befalling, befell.

"I have been here before!" I asserted,
In a nook on a neck of the Nile.
I once in a crisis was punished by Isis,
And you smiled. I remember your smile.

I had the same sense of persistence
On the site of the seat of the Sioux;
I heard in the teepee the sound of a sleepy
Pleistocene grunt. It was you.

The past made a promise, before it
Began to begin to begone.
This limited gamut brings you again. Damn it,
How long has this got to go on?
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..... ...as the invisible man.
 

 

More recent image of.... ...still as the invisible man.