Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Bad Middle of the Night Poetry

I woke up at 3 am in one of those states so familiar and not beloved of women of a certain age: dripping with sweat and unsure why it was suddenly 100 degrees in my room. As I blearily tried to go back to sleep, I wrote a terribly bad poem in my head. Then I thought about how I was going to get up and fire up the computer and put this poem on Twitter in one line increments starting with the last line so it would all be in order and stuff and what a novel fun thing this would be to do with Twitter, if annoying as hell and then I went back to sleep.

So here's the poem. It is very, very bad. Super bad. So bad that it is, in fact, a good indication of why 3 am poetry so rarely works out, particularly 3 am poetry that's prompted by the rapid fire bullet noises of walnuts hitting the broken down shed under which the groundhogs live, thus bringing melancholy thoughts of how no one really cares when entire groundhog burrows are wiped out by collapsing sheds or tsunamis or bulldozers or, you know, whatever.

Alack ye poor groundhogs
Something something something sort of ends with eeeeee, damn, I've forgotten it, but it was poignant, I swear.
Ye are but bound cogs
On the wheel of reality

Do you see that? Groundhogs - bound cogs! Yes! I rock at poetry.

7 comments:

ethylene said...

How about:
Weather warns ye back by degree
or
Seasons shifts to spite thee
or
Awaken by nuts at three

Edward said...

groundhogs bound cogs, that is impressive. Also like ethylene's "Awaken by nuts at three."

zen said...

once, while tripping, i told a cow that she was just a large fiber-eating earthworm with legs.

Didn't write a cool poem about it tho... drat.

ethylene said...

And who hasn't been awakened by nuts at three?

mygothlaundry said...

I really like the awakened by nuts at three. I think that's it, alack, ye groundhogs, awakened by nuts at three, etc.

Then there needs to be another stanza or six about all the perils of life as a groundhog. The rhyming perils.

ethylene said...

They lumber and bite
Should you live through the night
You'll still never quite know where they pee.


It's a wacky children's book in the making.
We could juxtapose them with hedgehogs and be very British about it.

Anonymous said...

"And all at once it came to me,
and i wrote and hunched 'till four-thirty
But that vestal light, it burns out with the night
in spite of all the time that we spent on it:
on one bedraggled ghost of a sonnet!"

(Joanna Newsom)