originally published in Grist #12 ca. 1967
reprinted with permission of Ron Padgett and Alice Notley

It hears itself as its own sounding echo,
The cold-cream dabbled baritone's, "Oh, heck! Oh!"
The boar-like baritone whose voice, like nickel-
Licorice-nigger-babies has the zing of a pickle.
"My sloe-eyed Sugar-Daddy," Frou-Frou call him
On the phone, mocking the voice of the waif, Kim.
Kim, meanwhile, is safely ensconced in a blimp
Fighting off "Sugar-Daddy," the baritone pimp
Whose flea-like baritone is not like Benjie's
Timid squeek which he learned from rusty hinges.
Thus you have met our entourage
Who sang their way to fame from Frou-Frou's Garage
Where we discovered Kim, the coloratura dwarf
Taking a shoe off
Alf, our mascot mule. "Shoo
Shoo," said Frou-Frou to Slim Kim. "Shoo-shoo!"
But then at last we got our change: the big day came
And went; later Alf stepped on Benjie's throat, breaking its frame,
But Frou-Frou welded him back together wrong, causing asphyxiation
In Benjie's breath apparatus. The resultant concatenation
Was a phrase we misunderstood. Then we put on our pants
And began to undress Alf, whom we had to destroy, at first chance,
The "Urge"
Not to destroy Alf took root first in Frou-Frou, beneath her blue serge
Epidermis. We had to call up Dr. Urge
To purge Frou-Frou. He led her into the swollen gorge
Room, which was filled with swollen gorges.
Frou-Frou had never looked more svelte nor gorgeous.
Dr. Urge adjusted his nipper-tongs, as Kim looked on with interest
But worried about his hideous boil which was about to infest
Benjie, leaning over his shoulder there in the gorge.
"He who laughs last laughs last," chortled George
Urge, inserting his pronged slicer into Frou-Frou.
"Woops!" chortled George Urge, "I've committed a boo-boo
To the State Home for the Gaseous." "Ugh," said Benjie"
To himself, Benjie.