Everything I Know About Bricklaying

This is all the knowledge I have
Accumulated in my life
About bricklaying.
If you put a brick in endways,
It's called a header.
If you put a brick in lengthways,
It's called a stretcher.
I wonder if the brick knows the difference?
If it had ambitions to be a stretcher
and ended up as a header,
Would it accept its lot gracefully,
Or would it rage and fume
and swear vengeance on the brickie?
I never found this out.
Google is no help.

A particular arrangement of bricks
Is called a bond.
Here are some that I know:
Flemish bond,
Chevron bond,
English garden wall bond.
There might be a Danish bond too,
Or maybe I'm thinking of pastries.
Bricks arranged in a particularly
Uninteresting way are called art.
Carl Andre does a lot of it.
Nobody has ever offered him a job
As a brickie.
He has no trowel skills.

To stop your mortar going to a hard lump
While you take a well-earned tea break,
Add a squirt of washing-up liquid.
There's some expensive stuff you can buy
To do the same job.
It's made of washing-up liquid,
But without the perfume.
It comes in a bottle
With important writing on.
Most brickies go for the washing-up liquid.
But they put it in an important bottle
In case anybody is looking.
This is why a brickie's hands
Are as soft as his face.
You can plane wood
With a brickie's face.

With all this knowledge at my disposal,
People often ask why I've never built
A wall to keep the enemies out.
One that can be seen from the moon.
But I don't care for the moon,
It's too flimpy and lackadaisical.
I like solid things.
Try throwing the moon
At a jeweller's window.
So I collect bricks
And label them
And stack them
And admire them
And imagine the day when
I will do something useful.