100,000,000,000,000 poems

The acid tongue with gourmet's expertise
When masons clutch the breath we held on loan
Old corned-beef's rusty armour spreads disease
And empty cages show life's bird has flown
The frisian Isles my friends are cherised things
When flame a form to wrath ancestral gave
The fertile mother changelings drops like kings
That every verbal shock aims to deprave
Platonic Greece was not so talentless
With gravity at gravity's great cog
And played their mountain croquet jungle chess
We'll suffocate before the epilogue
Where no one bothered how one warmed one's bum
And lessors' dates have all too short a sum


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.