2012-10-03 – Many years ago I wrote a limerick a day and called it Limeriques du Jour. I was talking about that with my family last night and my sister-in-law gave me a challenge. Can you write a limerick on the spot about the occupy movement. Here is what I came up with.

Your pain is your own and you cry
You stay home alone and you sigh
You march to win points
As you’re smoking your joints
And you tell all the world “occupy!”

I actually support the occupy movement, but, when you write limericks, you never know what aspect of the topic will emerge. It’s like an oracle. It’s always the truth, but it’s often surprising.

Next, my sister-in-law challenged me to write one on zen. But Lefty needed to go for a walk. So I composed this while lefty was sniffing the trees and the grass in the park.

Learning the practice of zen
Makes you the rarest of men
You make your mind empty
So nothing will tempt ye
And sit on an egg like a hen.

You see! The truth! I used to put these in my old blog, though my limerick-writing days actually predated blogs by a number of years. I had a widget in my old blog that let me load my limericks so a different one would come up randomly each time you came to the page. I had several dozen limericks loaded in the widget. When the blog provider went belly up, I had printed out most of the normal blog posts, but I lost many of the limericks because they were stored elsewhere.

Writing a limerick a day was very fun. And it was a great way to pass a few minutes to clear my mind. Now I mostly do the same thing by working a crossword puzzle. Maybe it’s time to go back to the limericks.

Uh, oh. It’s time to go to work.