Well, I'm no great poet - every now and again, a bit of rhyme sneaks in, and even more infrequently, I record it. Here are a few odds and ends. If you find them laughable, well, laugh - it's good for you!

Knowing When to Stop

A billion generations of procreation
Gave me a brain whose main realisation
Was that the creation of further generations
Of the human race
Was a waste of space.

So, I haven't - procreated that is.

Winter - a villanelle

A bitter wind has blown the clouds to rags,
Thin snow the paths has overridden,
I dream of summer, but this season drags.

In my neighbour’s barn a roof beam sags,
The cat brings in an unexpected wren,
A bitter wind has blown the clouds to rags,

The peat is frozen in the Bleaklow hags,
The sheep are silent in their winter pen,
I dream of summer, but this season drags.

Like toothache the hunger gnaws and nags,
Where the vixen in her earth lies hidden,
A bitter wind has blown the clouds to rags.

Frost needles the moss between the flags,
Thoughts of bleak lives arise unbidden,
I dream of summer, but this season drags.

Thin sunshine melts the ice on gritstone crags,
Time’s old machinery is on the move again,
A bitter wind has blown the clouds to rags,
I dream of summer, but this season drags.

I was quite proud of that, then I posted it on www.everypoet.com,
and someone called Howard Miller criticised it thus :-

Several problems with meter: some lines are iambic pentameter,
at least one iambic tetrameter, some odd mixtures of feet--the
result is an inconsistent number of stresses per line.
"Thin snow the paths has overridden"--Awkward
and inverted sentence structure over a century out of date
in formal verse.
Serious problem with the "b" rhymes: some of these
rhyme as "RID den," "HID den," "un
BID den," but others try unsuccessfully to rhyme with
the unstressed "den" of the first group, "wren"
and "pen." Such off-stress rhymes simply don't
work and really aren't rhymes in this context.
"The cat brings in an unexpected wren"--This line
seems to have nothing specific to do with winter and sees
to have been tossed in just to provide an (incorrect) rhyme.
"Thin sunshine melts the ice on gritstone crags"--The
idea of the ice "melting" seems to work against
the portrayal of winter throughout the rest of the piece;
this would seem to suggest the end of winter but doesn't
fit into a context that would allow it here.
"Thoughts of bleak lives arise unbidden"--Pretty
vague and non-specific, unlike some of the other more effective
images.

There are some good images and lines here, but lots of
work to be done yet.

I still like it - Howard clearly never suffered a Shepley winter, so what does he know?

The Alans - a revery

The Alans in their worm tower,
Looked out across the plain,
And though they looked for hours and hours,
They found it all in vain,
And the song they sang was hopeful,
Though lacking a refrain.

The Alans on their off nights,
Wore colossal hats of glue,
And some of them I have to add,
Had boots of finest poo,
Which is why they never could be friends,
For the likes of me and you.

Along the river Rimble,
Where the Pill-Rats count their wares,
The only way to get back down,
Is by endles flights of stairs.
Remember your memory's uselesss,
If you're remembering bears.

The Alans as they go about,
Have other hats of tin,
Which have edifying messages,
Emblazoned round the brim,
And they light their way with lanterns
Which burn a greenish gas,
Which is rendered pink and pearly,
By a special sort of glass.

So nearly palindromic,
The Slow Owls sit and wait,
On the inward facing outside
Of the outward facing gate,
And they have their food delivered
On a special sort of plate.

On the Arctic Tundra,
Far from the haunts of men,
An exquisite silver carriage,
Is pulled by a mighty hen,
Which wears elephantine leggings,
And carries a fountain pen.

I should like to say that this was caused by over indulgence
in dubious substances in the 1960s. It wasn't. It was in fact
caused by the normal state of what is laughingly called my mind.

Origins

My mother was made of magenta,
My father was made of Peru,
I was made of bottle tops,
And brought up at the zoo,
Which is how got my given name,
- Elliot Timbuctu