100,000,000,000,000 poems

The acid tongue with gourmet's expertise
Through snobbish growing round her hemline zone
The Turks said just take anything you please
And empty cages show life's bird has flown
O Parthenon you hold the charger's strings
Filching the lolly country thrift helped save
The fertile mother changelings drops like kings
To break a rule Britannia's might might waive
When dried the terrapin can naught express
With gravity at gravity's great cog
To prove mamma an adult with a tress
Their sculptors did our best our hulks the clog
Do bank clerks rule their abacus by thumb
They're kings we're mammal-cousins hi ho hum


Raymond Queneau

Translation to English by Stanley Chapman
found in "Oulipo Compendium"
Atlas 1998, ISBN 0-947757-96-1

Idea and implementation by Magnus Bodin 1997
Produced in the wonderful country of Sweden.