King Lear

When you try to divide up your borders
With your highly dysfunctional daughters,
Take some foolish advice:
Seek a kinglier price,
Or you’ll wind up with mental disorders.


Silverlock

A cold-hearted fellow named Shandon
Finds an isle of adventure to land in,
Filled with people who look
To have come from old books.
He’s quite piggish, but still keeps his hand in.

With a singer of tales from the past
Shandon brawls with a well-storied cast.
Will he fall into Hell,
Drink from Pirene’s own well,
Or be barred from barding at last?


Nineteen-Eighty-Four

WinSmith Minitrue [crimethink]
Julia FicDep [crimethink]
[thoughtcrime]
[sexcrime]
Big Brother plusgood [rhymestink]


Solaris

On a planet that’s covered with goo
That can look much like me or like you,
We are tempted to think
That the thing’s like a shrink,
But it’s more like a mirror of Shmoo.


One Thousand Nights and a Night

Scheherazade, called to the bed
Of a murderous Sultan, instead
Of jumping the rails,
Calms him with strange tales;
Keeps her head by not losing her head.


Flowers for Algernon

Intelligence surgery aims
To enable the simple to claim
An acuity spike.
But, Prometheus-like,
at the end mouse and man lose the flame


Stranger in a Strange Land

Poor Michael Valentine Smith,
He tried to become his own myth.
But the knife of the censor
Makes authors much tenser,
And novels much denser than Scrith.


Flatland

A. Square, who was locked in a plane,
Had A. Sphere uplift him and his brain.
His extended suspension
In higher dimensions
Got him legally labelled insane.


The Lathe of Heaven

George Orr suffers horrible dreams
That come true, but there’s more than it seems.
Dr. Haber, his shrink,
Comes quickly to think
That hypnosis will quiet his screams.

But the changes George makes all persist
From the past, so the Doctor enlists
George to help all the nation’s
Overpopulation,
And millions do cease to exist.

George Orr suffers horrible dreams
That come true, but there’s more than it seems.
Dr. Haber, his shrink,
Comes quickly to think
That hypnosis will quiet his screams.

But the changes George makes all persist
From the past, so the Doctor enlists
George to help all the nation’s
Overpopulation,
And millions do cease to exist.


The Man Who Was Thursday

A poet-detective named Syme,
Joined a day-of-the-week pantomime.
Though he and the rest
Wore their full Sunday-best,
They kept fighting themselves all the time.


A Christmas Carol

Old Scrooge by the spirits is wrung
Into goodness–But a thought’s at my tongue.
How much more good there’d be,
And less rapacity,
Had they done all this when he was young?