My mind is going. I meant Donald Barthelme. With the book sitting in front of me, yet.
Are you sure that’s not from Burma Shave?
“Celery”
Celery raw
Develops the jaw.
But celery stewed
Is more quietly chewed.
“Reflection on Babies”
A bit of talcum
Is always walcum.
“The Firefly”
The firefly’s flame
Is something for which science has no name
I can think of nothing eerier
Than flying around with an unidentified glow on a person’s posteerier.
Amongst the anthropophagi
People’s friends are people’s sarcophagi.
Back in college I once wrote up some stage directions for our drama club to visit kids’ Christmas parties and perform The Boy Who Laughed at Santa Claus.
Poor Jabez Dawes. Good times. 
I’ve loved Ogden Nash ever since I was a little kid, growing up in India. My poor long-suffering father must have read “The Wendigo” out to me about seventeen thousand times over the years, and I can still recite all of it by heart. Also “Custard the Dragon”, which was the other half of that book. Ah, good times.
Then, when I was a bit older, I went and bought the collected works of Nash, and dip into it from time to time to renew my delight in his unconventional rhymes and gentle witty insight into human behaviour. A friend of mine asked me to do a reading at their wedding last year, and I chose to read Nash. No, not
but rather the splendid I do, I will, I have. It was much appreciated.
Some pains are physical
and some pains are mental
but the one that’s both
is dental
The sweetbread is a type of meat
That is neither bread nor sweet.
And since it’s neither sweet nor bread
I think I’ll have a bun instead.
Isaac Asimov once remarked he tried to write a poem in the style of Ogden Nash because Nash made it look so easy. He discovered it’s only easy if your name is Ogden Nash.
I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Ogden Nash’s work; thanks to all for brightening a rainy Monday for me! My dad peppered me when I was younger with bits of doggerel both his own and Nash’s. Unfortunately, it’s genetic and I have passed down the trait to my sons as well.
All the ones I know and enjoy have already been posted.
I will say that someone has set many of the animal poems to music, and several years ago, my church choir sang a handful of them - the panther, the firefly, and the cow. You can listen to a completely different choir sing them here.
A line from one of his longer poems (sadly, I can’t locate which one) is my favorite:
(The narrator is challenged to use the word “affidavit” in a sentence) “Saul was the king before David, and Solomon was the king affidavit.”
I tried to Google this, and came up with a post I made a long time ago to Trivia Dominoes.
Actually, maybe my favorite Ogden Nash poem is “Songs for a Boss Named Mr. Linthicum”, from Hard Lines. Unfortunately I can’t find a link to a copy of it.
That was one of the “Strange Case” poems, The Strange Case of Mr. Ballantine’s Valentine. (In the actual book, each line of the “Strange Case” poems is separated by a dingbat.)
I’m British, born 1948; my parents were quite fans of things American, and we had at home a couple of small books anthologising various verse by Nash – as a kid, I read these with interest and, mostly, pleasure. I’ve tended particularly to like Nash’s “poems with rhyme but no metre”, as cited above (a way of versifying, which IMO has actually been imitated, quite well, by various others – the British humorist Paul Jennings, for one). I incline on the whole to like Nash’s “no metre” poems, better than his ones which scan – which latter strike me often as rather “whimsy” and cloying.
There’s one “scanning” one of his, though, which I really love – his brief poem about the wombat.
The wombat lives beyond the seas,
Amid the far Antipodes.
He may subsist on nuts and berries,
Or then again, on missionaries.
His distant habitat precludes
Extensive knowledge of his moods;
But I would not engage the wombat
In any form of mortal combat.
Nash seemed decidedly to have a “thing” about dentists – it shows up in a number of his poems.
And if there is one man who I hope his dentist was a sadist and all his teeth were brittle ones,
It is he who invented “Chopsticks” for the little ones.
Goody. No one’s posted my favorite yet:
Tell me, O Octopus, I begs
Is those things arms, or is they legs?
I marvel at thee, Octopus
If I were thou, I’d call me Us
From Very Like a Whale:
*
That’s the kind of thing that’s being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson;
They’re always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of snow and I’ll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical blanket material and we’ll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you’ll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile. *
In 11th grade English we had to perform a poem for the class. I liked Ogden Nash so I performed “You’ll Drink Your Orange Juice and Like It, Comrade.”
It was rather tricky with all the “s” sounds.
Ahem
There’s a Cyprus citrus surplus
Citrus surplus Cypriotic.
No Sicilian citrus surplus
But a Cyprus citrus surplus
Not a Cyprus citron surplus
But a Cyprus citrus surplus
Not a Cyprus citrus circus
But a Cyprus citrus surplus.
It’s a special citrus surplus
“Just a surface citrus surfeit,”
Says a cryptic Coptic skeptic.
I’ve always liked his “A Lady who Thinks she is Thirty”, especially the third verse.
“Shining like the morning star,
Like the twilight shining,
Haunted by a calendar,
Miranda is a-pining.”