The article is discussed some metalanguage techniques of D. Kharms’ poems for children. Lexical, sematic, and syntactic analyses allow to demonstrate that these techniques have a lot in common with Kharms’ techniques of «adults’» poems and the esthetic of OBERIU (the Association for Real Art) which declared the material world, subject, and word. Besides the traditional homonymous and homophonic wordplays, in Kharms’ poems for children there are some distractions of word integrity and conventionality of a language sign which help to make the boundary between the real and the unreal (game) not so obvious. There are also some cases of semantic reallocation (into the meaning of the word) or deconstruction of the meaning changing the syntagmatic and pragmatic characteristics of the word (as a result we have some mistakes of lexical coordination and situations of referential uncertainty). All these techniques can be found in the children’s speech as well — on the early stage of language acquisition with its situativeness and overgeneralization (overextention of the meaning), but in the poetic communication these metalanguage techniques work as markers of absurdity which can be described not as an existential notion but as a method of the distancing. At the same time such techniques can have some gnoseological eff ect, because they let kids understand not only the language rules but also the borders of their own speech freedom.