THE PUBLISHER

: A Book For Kids

I'd like to be a publisher, And publish massive tomes

Written in a massive style by blokes with massive domes--

Science books, and histories of Egypt's day and Rome's,

Books of psycho-surgery to mine the minds of momes,

And solemn pseudo-psychic stuff to tell where Topsy roams

When her poor clay is put away beneath the spreading holms;

Books about electrocuting little seeds with ohms

To sternly show them h w to grow in sands, and clays, and loams,

And bravely burst infinitives, like angry agronomes;

Books on breeding aeroplanes and airing aerodromes,

On bees that buzz in bonnets and the kind that build the combs,

Made plain with pretty pictures done in crimsons, mauves, and chromes;

And diagrams to baulk the brain of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

I'd set the scientists to work like superheated gnomes,

And make them write and write and write until the printer foams

And lino men, made "loony", go to psychopathic homes.

I'd publish books, I would--large books on ants and antinomes

And palimpsests and palinodes and pallid pallindromes:

But I wouldn't be a publisher if . . . .

I got many "pomes."

Would you?