Roses are red, poetry makes me blue...
BURTON W. COLE, Editor
By Burton W. Cole
I have long been fascinated by poetry. And by “fascinated,” I mean bored to tears.
I learned from childhood that I wasn’t cut out for this sort of high-falutin culture. Poetry perplexed me.
Take, for example, this verse that Mom read to me:
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
There came a big spider,
Who sat down beside her,
And frightened Miss Muffet away.
This left me with lots of questions. What is a tuffet? Was that just a polite way of saying she plopped down on her fanny?
Are curds and whey like Cap’n Crunch and Cocoa Puffs? No way am I eating something called a curd. Give me the cute spider of any size.
I swore off the fancy snobbery of poetry until my Uncle Tom taught me a much better piece of rhyme and reason:
Birdie, birdie in the sky,
Why’d you do that in my eye?
I’m sure glad that elephants can’t fly.
Now THAT I understood. Simple. Brilliant. Profound. And containing all the culture a young boy would want to encounter.
From those simple beginnings, I tried to wow and woo my 8-year-old classmates with exquisite lines such as this gem from Gelett Burgess:
I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one.
The other day as I wandered through my boorish life, I reflected on my days of being a finely cultured specimen of society, back when I would intone with masterful elocution beautiful sentiments such as:
Algie saw a bear,
The bear saw Algie,
The bear was bulgy,
The bulge was Algie.
Nothing beats the cultured classics.
More than ever, we need an infusion of class, a splash of culture. There’s nothing that infuses class and splash any better than a snobby dash of poetry.
You may not think of me as a connoisseur of class of any sort. I assure you, that from the tips of my broken-down sneakers to the top of my tattered ball cap, I exude nothing but class.
True, passers-by often accuse me of exuding, and frequently gift me bars of Irish Spring and cans of Old Spice for it. They say it’s because I am classy. Or a poem that rhymes with that.
Since I am such a classy person, every once in a while I blow the dust off my poetry books and recite a few stanzas of moldy culture, such as this masterpiece by Richard Leavesly:
Oh, my beloved belly button.
The squidgy ring in my midriff mutton.
Your mystery is such tricky stuff:
Why are you so full of fluff?
My late wife was partial to the works of the great poet Wallace Tripp. She often recited this succinct magnum opus:
Marguerite, go wash your feet;
The board of health is ’cross the street.
I’m feeling full up and overflowing with class and culture today, so much so that I shall leave you with this splash of splendor and refinement that I find neither perplexing nor boring that you can savor all day long:
A funny young fellow named Perkins
Was terribly fond of small gherkins.
One day after tea
He ate ninety-three
And pickled his internal workings.
Ah, ain’t class and culture grand?
Roses are red, violets are blue, write Burt at news@falmouthoutlook.com, and he might write back to you.