The People Upstairs, by Ogden Nash
The people upstairs all practise ballet
Their living room is a bowling alley
Their bedroom is full of conducted tours.
Their radio is louder than yours,
They celebrate week-ends all the week.
When they take a shower, your ceilings leak.
They try to get their parties to mix
By supplying their guests with Pogo sticks,
And when their fun at last abates,
They go to the bathroom on roller skates.
I would love the people upstairs wondrous
If instead of above us, they just lived under us.
Comments from Our Poetry Editor, Ira Maine
Chapz,
Ogden Nash, born in New York in 1902. Wonderful character and sharp as a Yellow Box splinter. After some years in advertising he eventually worked his way onto the payroll of the New Yorker where he proceeded to become indispensable. He is undoubtedly, hilariously, an American National Treasure. as this poem amply demonstrates. He died in 1971.
Don’t spend all your money on obtaining ‘The Collected Verse’. Any half-way decent secondhand bookshop is almost bound to have a copy for a couple of bucks.
Happy days…and recklessly adventurous nights!
Gottfried Fish.