While browsing used titles in Cambridge, / I found an old volume, The Limerick. / Tho not illustrated, / ‘Twas unexpurgated / The famous Paris Edition and you get the idea. It’s a consolidation of various sources dating from 1870 to 1952 and even includes one questionable mention of Toronto from 1941:
There’s an unbroken babe from Toronto,
Exceedingly hard to get onto,
But when you get there,
And have parted the hair,
You can fuck her as much as you want to.
The poems are racist, sexist, misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic, explicit, pornographic … but not all of them. You have to read with a discerning ear because the whole point of the genre is to skirt along the edges of taboo. Some fall to one side of the line, some to the other. If you dismiss them all out if hand, you may deny yourself a healthy dose of raunchiness, which is an important human need. Just ask Abraham Maslow.
Leaving aside the bit about breaking a woman, it’s clear that the limerick above was not composed by a local Torontonian. No local would use “onto” and “want to” as rhymes for our fair city. Listen to the classic Kings song, This Beat Goes On/Switchin’ To Glide, to hear it done right. “Donna” is an appropriate rhyming word for Trawna. There is no second “t” in Toronto and the final “o” is spoken as a short “a”. With that in mind, I offer ten original Trawna-inspired limericks and another random batch for good measure. Enjoy. Be offended. Or both.
A lady I know from Toronto
had a cunt with the mouth of a piranha.
When I stuck my nose in,
it nipped at my chin
and said: I”m not flora; I”m fauna.
A lady I know from Toronto
would only have sex in the sauna.
She’d crank up the steam
and then she would scream:
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna!
A tenor I know from Toronto
suffered an opera trauma.
A baritone klutz
kicked him square in the nuts
and now he’s singing soprana.
A poor schmuck named John from Toronto
lost his cock to a vicious piranha.
The surgeon on call
removed his last ball,
completing his change to Johanna.
I once knew a girl on Spadina
renowned for her tasty vagina.
At breakfast, so sweet!
By mid-day, spiced meat!
And by night it would please a fine diner.
Rob Ford, our mayor, is a clown
who smokes crack to govern our town.
His platform, it seems,
rests on pipe dreams
and vacuous smiles all round.
The pandas have come to the zoo.
I went for the really big show.
But ever so boring,
they sat on the flooring
and couldn’t be bothered to screw.
A guy who was raised in East York
developed a taste for pulled pork.
It’s Hogtown, they said,
so he pulled it in bed
with his fingers, but never a fork.
A lady who frequents High Park
jogs in the nude for a lark.
As firm as her tush is
And bushy, her bushes,
people wish she would jog after dark.
A man was at city hall skating,
when he thought it was time for a mating.
His schlong hit the ice
and a blade sliced and diced
and the pieces disappeared thru the grating.
And now for the random, non-Trawna batch:
A supernumerary nipple
is a wonderful place for a tipple.
It’s nub can produce
the most wonderful juice.
So cheers! And lean in for a sipple.
A fellow I know had a schlong
a single micrometer long.
Unable to make it,
he found ways to fake it
with a plastic strap-onable dong.
The people who give to the arts
are mostly a bunch of old farts.
They sniff at their wine
as they gather to dine
and fill adult diapers with sharts.
A penis is easy to please.
It rises to whatever it sees:
a dog or a sheep,
most anything deep,
‘cept the hole in a hive full of bees.
I once knew a girl named Joy
who liked to play with her toy:
a big piece of wood
that felt ever so good,
though she wished she could play with a boy.
A man with a taste for the poodle
loved to diddle and doodle.
He licked clean their nuts
tho never their butts,
for the poodle diddler had Standards.
There once was a fellow named Fritz
whose penis was covered in zits.
No one went near it
or touched it for fear it
would send them off shaking in fits.
An alien came down to earth
and surprised the whole world with his girth.
Tho highly berated
for the way that he mated,
he was missed when he left for his berth.
A man with the surname of Kurtz
had a wife who would scream “Oh it hurts.”
He whittled it thin
’til it slid neatly in.
Now his wife says: “It fits when he spurts.”
A Canuck whose testes were big
liked to fiddle and dance a fast jig.
They refused just to dangle
but together would jangle
and disrupt his folk music gig.
I dated a girl from Korea
renowned for her red diarrhea.
I thought it was cool
how the blood dyed her stool
’til I found out she had gonorrhea.
The rabbi performing my bris
was reputed to be hit and miss.
When he slipped with his knife
it altered my life
and I went from master to miss.
The minimalist composer named Glass
inserted pop rocks up his ass.
When the violins played,
he bent over splayed
and blew up the hall with his gas.