Doggerel Verses
Sexuality, Satire, Crudity, Commonplace,
Sing-Song, Limericks, Irreverence, Jokes,
Short Verse, Rhymes, Songs, Trite, Low,
Comical Verses, Irregular Rhythms,
Bad Habits, Bodily Functions, Cussing
Adults Only: Not for the Squeamish
By Mike Garofalo
1.
Pleasures at Hand
An activity quite handy
always available to me
don't cost a cent
nothing to go out and buy
clean, simple, ready at hand
no need for another's help
convenient, accessible,
personal, private, alone
no need to travel anywhere
poor or rich, who cares,
safe and healthy
day or night at any time
no need to talk or listen.
Lots of fun, pleasures free
all you need: an active mind
a creative imagination
erotically inclined
pacing with your hot hand,
Yes, Masturbation's grand.
2.
he soaped
showered
toweled off
jacked off
dressed in white
3.
He farted
really loud—
campfire laughter
4.
a plop of shit
down the outhouse hole—
no paper
5.
The silence of decades dead
echo endlessly
in every muscle and vein;
Her kisses are remembered
by my tender love lips.
6.
The desire to smoke cannabis
in my deep blood brain
soaked from habits
unrestrained;
the urges slowly leave in weeks
but guilt still leaves a scar.
7.
Jetty stones, rocky levees,
embrace the River
Columbia to the Sea;
Seagulls and noisy geese
shit on the dirt levees.
7a.
Doggerel Verses - Google Chrome
Doggerel Poetry Form: Laugh Out Loud
Best Doggerel of All Time
Anthology by Michael R. Birch
8.
crawling under the house
sewer pipe broke
puddles of stinking crap...
fixing, reconnecting, glued;
spreading sand on the smell.
9.
masturbating
in the dark
motel alone—
sticky cum on
Kleenex tossed
10.
fewer painful
confessionals to share—
secretive
closed
unpacked dirty underwear
11.
hot chick
encouraged me
to kiss and lick tenderly
as she grabbed and stoked my
stiff dick
12.
Laugh at the dying of the Light
Embrace the Uncertain Night
Useless to Rage and Rage
Boozing your guts away
Rather Face the Fucking Day
13.
She talked dirty
he jacked off
She spit on his face
he shot his rocks off
14.
Father Priest once
counseled me—
while on my knees
in the dim confessional box.
Stopped kneeling for sanity!
15.
Punished in Eternal Hell...
for eating carne on Friday?
for reading banned Voltaire?
for jacking off alone?
for doubting Father Priest?
Ridiculous unjust nonsensical
implausibilities
abandoned 65 year ago.
16.
Not sweet
not sour
delicious sticky
tasty
cunt juice devoured
17.
picking boogers
from my nose—
she chided me
for crudity
when not alone
18.
a little groan
piss flowed—
prostate slow
19.
So, what's so interesting
about your sex life, or
mine for that matter;
that we should want to
write poems about our orgasms,
or our lover's orgasms,
or how we fell in or out of love,
or our messy bed covers,
or our smells and tastes,
or our intimate confessions,
or our wild kinky escapades,
or our sexual distastes,
or our messy affairs,
or impotence,
or sexual
ecstasies,
or LGBT loves or hates,
or lost lovers,
or all that sexual ho hum stuff.
All those old fancy sonnets,
about sexual love ...
Yawn!
Let some other old poet write,
wonderfully and cleverly,
about his/her getting laid.
I just write prose porn
and get paid.
20.
Sexual Disciplines
She held Her whip in hand,
gave Her Commands—
He bowed and obeyed
like a horny toady slave.
Playing Top-bottom bdsm games.
She played the Dominatrix
in kinky sex games
for fun—
he knelt naked before Her
She slapped him some.
She talked dirty,
he jacked off.
She spit on his face,
he shot his rocks off.
Humiliated!
He bowed down
licked her heels
kissed her feet;
fetish dreams
of worshipping.
He was under his thumb:
disgraced, put down, numb.
He was under her thumb:
loved, uplifted, fun.
Utterly Different Thumbs.
21.
hungry for love
thirst for a kiss
eager to suck
ready to fuck—
wishing for luck
22.
Baffled by imaginative eyes,
looking beyond ordinary shoes,
kissing indecent cheeks of rouge,
kissing black leather boots on you,
sucking fetishes like shots of booze.
23.
she wanted to be adored
bought lingerie
at the Fredrick's store—
for an hour
his interest flared
24.
his flaccid dick
could not rise
he tried and tried
used every means—
frustrating impotency
25.
pissed my pants
dribbling drips
down my thighs—
old man's pee pee
lost its jive
26.
Newlyweds honeymooning
in Williams, Arizona—
She Did IT Seven Times
in just One day - a
Grand Canyon of Lust.
27.
not sleeping
both clock hands at 12,
sitting in my green chair
reading porn, cock in my hand;
erect, alive, tensed, a man.
28.
Some family and friends
homosexuals, not queer,
ordinary folks of good cheer,
hardworking, smart, nice;
no reason to fear.
29.
Puce bustier
not for the shy—
elegant cleavage
caught his eyes
aroused his mind
30.
Neighborhood fat-men
talking outside—
every fourth word "Fuck"
every sixth work "Shit"
"God damn" for emphasis.
[Current American Eloquence]
31.
colored fantasies
vivid dreams
shades of insights
scraps of epiphanies
boundless sensuality
32.
You can smoke some shit,
drink until your shit faced,
buy some more shit,
feel like shit,
and find yourself in a boat load of shit.
33.
He named his two watch dogs:
Timex and Rolex.
Your age: always higher, never lower.
Why is the Goldfish so expensive?
What's another word for "Thesaurus?"
A Christmas tree has many needles but does not sew.
People give their mistakes a name: Experience.
A telephone has many rings but no fingers.
A yardstick has three feet but cannot walk.
A shoe thas a tongue but cannot talk.
Tomorrow comes but never arrives.
Becoming colder
I move to the corner
where it was always 90 degrees—
laughing loudly
the riddle sneezed.
727 Riddles, Jokes, Brain Teasers
34.
My middle finger says "up yours."
Fate might give us the finger,
and, as a rule of thumb, we
must accept the bad some.
I thank my middle finger
for sticking up for me.
Fist Up, Fuck You Racist America.
35.
I Do This I Do That:
Like O'Hara's rat race
from cafe to subway
gallery to Queer Baths
from here to there, Fast.
- James Lehman,
The Last Avant-Garde
36.
"I hear the sewage singing
underneath my bright white seat and know
the somewhere sometimes it will reach the sea
gulls and swordfishes will find it richer that a river.
- John O'Hara
37.
She was a hot tamale
He a cool dude
Together a Love Couple
Hip and real rude
Young with fast moves
38.
we kissed
we touched
we sucked
we fucked
Pure Lust
39.
"An Irishman came to my city.
His manner was charming and witty.
He courted a lass
Who had a large ass,
And he praised her big butt in a ditty."
- Judi Van Gorder
40.
"There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a Tiger;
They came back from the ride
With the lady inside,
And a smile on the face of the Tiger."
- Anonymous
41.
They sometimes are
what we can’t imagine
they are:
rapists of women
sodomizers of boys
42,
subtle hints
of availability—
Tempting me
to taste
her skin
43.
Doggerel Verses
Notes, Research, Bibliography,
Links, Sources, Favorites
By Mike Garofalo
Doggerel: "A low, or trivial, form of verse, loosely constructed and often irregular, but effective because of its simple mnemonic rhyme and loping meter. It appears in most literatures and societies as a useful form for comedy and satire. It is characteristic of children’s game rhymes from ancient times to the present, and of most nursery rhymes."
- Britannica
Doggerel, or doggerel, is poetry that is irregular in rhythm and in rhyme, often deliberately for burlesque or comic effect. Alternatively, it can mean verse which has a monotonous rhythm, easy rhyme, and cheap or trivial meaning. The word is derived from the Middle English doggerel, probably a derivative of dog. In English, it has been used as an adjective since the 14th century and a noun since at least 1630. Appearing since ancient times in the literatures of many cultures, doggerel is characteristic of nursery rhymes and children's songs."
- Wikipedia
"Which poets wrote the best doggerel of all time? Who wrote the best doggerel in the English language? Ironically, the greatest writer of English poetry was also a lover and master of doggerel: William Shakespeare! Other masters of English doggerel include Anonymous, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll, Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Frost, Mother Goose, Rudyard Kipling, Edwin Lear, Spike Milligan, Ogden Nash, Dr. Seuss, John Skelton and Mark Twain.
I believe there are two types of doggerel: (1) poetry so inept it makes us cringe, and (2) entertaining, tongue-in-cheek poetry that makes us wince, smile, chuckle and/or giggle."
- The Best Doggerel of All Time
Doggerel Verses - Google Chrome
Doggerel Poetry Form: Laugh Out Loud
Best Doggerel of All Time
Anthology by Michael R. Birch
4a.
"1343 - Geoffrey Chaucer coined the term "rym doggerel" for his Tale of Sir Topas, a burlesque of long-winded medieval romances.
1460 - John Skelton described his rhymes as "ragged, tattered and jagged" in Colin Clout.
1552 - Edmund Spenser wrote Mother Hubberd's Tale, the first known example of the Mother Goose tales.
1564 - William Shakespeare employed limericks and/or limerick meter in Othello, King Lear and The Tempest.
1613 - Samuel Butler employed doggerel in his long narrative satire Hudibras.
1626 - The first texts containing the French terms mere l’oye or mere oye (Mother Goose).
1812 - Edward Lear popularized the limerick form with his Book of Nonsense.
1825 - William McGonagall became famous (or infamous) for his doggerel.
1832 - Lewis Carroll employed doggerel in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
1902 - Ogden Nash would become one of the best-known modern penners of doggerel.
1904 - Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, has probably made more money from doggerel than anyone."
- Best Doggerel of All Time
"There is doggerel which is doggerel, and doggerel which is not."
- George Saintsbury
Doggerel Verse and Critical Recoil. By Andrea Denny-Brown.
"What makes doggerel challenging and also exciting, as an undertheorized term of poetic aesthetics, is its frontal attack on readerly sensibilities: its use of clumsy and clunky rhythm and rhyme, mismatched diction, and other self-conscious (or unselfconscious) modes of triviality, its capacity, as David Rothman puts it, to “travesty” the workings of serious poetry. For Rothman, doggerel's capacity to brutalize a listener's poetic sensibilities means it can “say things that metrical norms and appropriate rhymes exclude”, bringing into the poetic sphere that which has been ignored, discounted, and rejected by contemporary poetic standards. Because it is both a poetic practice and an aesthetic category, doggerel requires a multifold definition: its formal poetic features, as the OED defines them, are “comic, burlesque, and usually composed in irregular rhythm” and also more simply, “badly composed or expressed; trivial.” A more expansive definition might articulate doggerel's potential as a versified counterstrategy to culturally dominant (or even culturally emerging) poetic modes, a practice that targets poetic norms and the often-entrenched modalities that build up around them, with the ultimate effect of opening up new spaces for creativity and critique. In the following sections I examine this capacity through a key element of Middle English doggerel verse, rhythmic irregularity, in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate, arguing that their formative uses of doggerel create deliberate points of friction between poets and listeners that expose and challenge accepted modes of poetic understanding, such as the stylized training of the poet's ear. These early examples not only play with the idea of intentional and unintentional doggerel, laying the groundwork for later criticism in the history of English language and literature, but they also play with the idea of pleasing and displeasing poetic sound, showcasing the extent to which doggerel from the beginning claims a space for unpalatable poetic forms even while it sets up the terms for their critical castigation and recoil."
- Doggerel Verse and Critical Recoil. By Andrea Denny-Brown.
Sensual, Passionate, Sexy, Erotic Quotes and Verses
The 7 Most Popular, and Powerful, Sexual Fantasies. By Michael Castleman.
25 Steps and Beyond: Collected Works
By Mike Garofalo
At the Edges of the West, Volume 1
Highway 101 and Hwy 1: Pacific Coast
At the Edges of the West, Volume 2
Highway 99 and Interstate 5
Cuttings: Tercets, Haiku, Epigrams
Poetry Research by Mike Garofalo
Mike Garofalo lives in Vancouver, Washington.
He worked for 50 years in city and county
public
libraries, and in elementary
schools.
He graduated with
degrees in
philosophy,
library science, and education. He has been
a web publisher since 1998.
25 Steps and Beyond: Collected Works
I really appreciate positive feedback,
reviews, kudos, and encouragement
about the value
of
my free webpages.
Send your comments to:
Text Press Email
This document was last edited, revised,
reformatted, added to, relinked,
changed, improved, or modified
by Mike Garofalo
on June 5, 2025.