Poems! They aren't always about camouflaged intentions and word-dappled landscapes and unspoken emotions!

Granted, most of them are, but still...

Anyway, this Poetry Friday we'd like to celebrate the poems that think outside the box (poemtarilly speaking), the poems that choose unusual subjects for their dark excursions into the subconscious. 

So please enjoy William Bauer's greatly enjoyable, greatly odd "The Rubber Bathtub Duck and the Rubber Bathtub Bear" (from Unsnarling String).

Read it in the tub if you wish. But don't blame us if you drop the book.

The Rubber Bathtub Duck and the Rubber Bathtub Bear

Prim in its mimetic truth
The rubber duck cruises the real
Porcelain pond,
Its horizontal bill
Always pointed ahead to
Where it assumes it will go,
Even as it whirls in giddy circles
When the plug is pulled.
Such a duck as that is like
The captain of a ship
Standing at attention on the
Deck as it slowly sinks beneath
The waves.
What rectitude!
What loveliness of character!
Oh admirable rubber duck!

But rubber bathtub bear
Flawed in your very conception
You are no swimming bear
The world has ever seen.
You either float on your back
Like an overfed plutocrat
At the seashore
Happy toes aloft
Or with an easy roll
Do the deadman's float
And make us think of
Grappling irons
Or horrific bloated drifters
Washed up on the beach.
Such a bear as that is like
A booming fart in church
Or one and one not adding up to two.
Oh despicable bear!
Oh true bad bear!
To be not real at all,
Or even trying!