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Title: Jokes Of The Night
Author: John Kendrick Bangs [
More Titles by Bangs]
BLESSED jokes of my dreams! Your praises I’d sing.
No mirth can compare to the mirth that you bring.
I’ve read London _Punch_ from beginning to end,
On all comic papers much money I spend,
But naught that is in them can ever seem bright
Beside the rich jokes that I dream of at night.
How I laugh at those jests of my brain when at rest,
The gladdest and merriest, sweetest and best!
And how, when I wake in the morning and try
To call them to mind, oh how bashful, how shy
They seem, how they scatter and hide out of sight-
Those jokes of my dreamings, those jests of the night!
Take the one that came to me to-day just at dawn:
The Cable-Car turns and remarks to the Prawn,
"The Crowbar is seasick; but then what of that,
As long as the Camel won’t wear a silk hat?"
I laughed-why, I laughed till my wife had a fright
For fear I’d go wild from that joke of the night.
And they’re all much like that one-elusive enough,
Yet full of facetious, hilarious stuff-
Stuff past comprehension, stuff no man dares tell;
For nocturnal jests, e’en told ever so well-
’Tis odd it should be so-are not often bright,
Except to the dreamer who dreams them at night.
[The end]
John Kendrick Bangs's poem: Jokes Of The Night
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