Kenneth Koch wrote superb parodies. Probably the best known, the one that most brilliantly combines critical insight with laughter, is his set of variations on William Carlos Williams’s "forgive me" poem, raising the stakes from raiding the refrigerator to breaking the partner’s leg while dancing. Koch also wrote beautiful and funny parodies of Frost, Pound, and Hopkins, but I have a soft spot in my heart for his spoof of D. H. Lawrence’s passionate animal poems. The first line of the second stanza always cracks me up — because, I guess, of the triple iteration of "rat" and the straight-faced simplicity of the syntax.
— DL
I Like Rats
I never saw a rat
Sorry for itself.
I never saw two rats
Consoling one another for being rats.
Rats live good full rat-lives with other rats.
Rat mind and rat heart plunge them into rat sex
with other impassioned rats.
People say they are ugly and dirty and cause disease.
I say people cause disease.
I never caught a cold or syphilis or gonorrhea or
manic depression from a rat.
— Kenneth Koch
Go here to listen to the D. H. Lawrence poem as declaimed by Viggo Mortenson in the film GI Jane with Demi Moore.