Introduction: By M. Swingset Manham

As with most Ask Bozzes, Ask Boz in the 1800’s did what he was supposed to do: answer questions. This changed in 1876, when complications due to a shark bite landed him in hospital. While staying at the Institut für Haifischbissen und verrückte Maniacs in Dresden, Ask Boz was prescribed cocaine and opiates to relieve the pain. Inspired, and high as a kite, Ask Boz 1800’s produced as many as 300 poems in the space of a week.

However, the mixture of the drugs and “the British accented voices in my head” led to these poems being lost for over a century. Ask Boz tells us in his journals:

Doubling my medication didn’t inspire me to write more poems, but to hide the ones I had written. Though I initially fought off the idea, the British blokes kept saying things like “Hiding your poems is a topper idea, what?” and “Hells to jingles about them Indians. Yes, from both continents. Hide your poems!” I finally negotiated that I would hide them, but I would make a map to all of them, then I would hide the map. Then I laughed at a lamp for about fifteen minutes. It was a funny lamp.

The discovery of the map in 1997 by Theologian Hans Frei, who found it in what he described as “the most hilarious lamp I’ve ever seen,” sent the Ask Boz literary research center into a complete freakin’ panic. Which was really unprofessional, and a lot of them lost their Ask, and just had to be Boz, and a few lost their Boz, which is really terrible to see, but sometimes punishment is necessary, like scratching wounds 'til they bleed is sometimes, too. But because those nerds couldn’t handle it, it was a real opportunity for the Ask Boz aggressive in-line Poetry Research Team to come in and take over. They really have the “grrrr” you need to follow a map and find hidden poetry.

Still, patience is needed, Dear Fans of Ask Bozzes’ ageless wisdom. With each poem they find, the team must bag, annotate, bind, interpret, do a double-blind study, come up with critiques from all known schools of literary criticism, restore, translate the poem into all known languages, then post them here. So while there may be only a few here now, there are certainly more to come over the next decades.

Whereof Attacked by a Shark, as Icarus Waterlogged – April 12th, 1876

Ah, I bobbed in Poseidon’s great wet,
Resting after a far swim,
Seeing the shore far in mist’s dim
Unheeding the shark for to about to owe me debt

And you, O’ shark, where did you lurk
‘neath that great god’s water skirt?
When did you espy my form,
And frame murderous intent for to me be torn?
I had swum too far, swam too hubristically,
Icarus of the water. Did I see feathers
Feathering my arm? No, not realistically
But it is my simile, loose though its tethers.

The bite came, the mouth of knives,
The enumeration of regrets, the flashing of lives
A pain too great a pain for me to tell,
The screaming out of “Shit! What the hell!?”

The great gray beast, longer than I was tall
Reared up in the water, jaw smeared with my blood
Could it know that it, Dumpty like, faced a great fall?
That human fluid boils hotter, given revenge’s chewing cud?

Here I am happy I swim with a knife
Here I am glad to end a creature’s life,
Stem to stern I ripped a gash,
It roared its death with a bloody splash!

Safely to shore, I shook and sang
And in my head, an image rang,
Of a boy so brave to take on the sun,
(Despite its massive size advantage,
And the prodigious output of heat there from)
Who wouldn’t have been known as a failing son,
If only bring a knife he would,
He could have slashed the sun fair good.

- Poetry page 2