My Big Brother from Another Mother, Bob Kabchef, shared my poem “vapor trail” with his readership today, prefacing it with a description that tickles me: “The guy’s a veritable volcano of virgin verbaciousness.” Thing is, though, volcanic though I may be sometimes, I owe a lot to Bob throwing title prompts at me, during a weekly event that I produce for our Facebook poetry group Poets All Call. Yesterday he offered a bouquet of titles, three of which were

Eloosive
Pasta your prime
I never knew that

Funny how the mind works. “Write a poem, Gary” will yield brain fog, confusion, and unproductiveness. But “Write a bunch of poems using these titles, Gary” and I am off to the races. I cranked these out in less than an hour.

Eloosive

The loosely-jointed burglar
Squeezed thruogh the junkyard’s crevices
A dog much like a murderer
Was also on the premises
A silent lethal frothing beast
With much adrenaline released
His mission: see the thief deceased
But Burgle-Man was wily;
The challenge made him smiley.

He topped a mound of carcasses
Of Ford and Studebaker
The doggoe climbed sans barkuses
To make the thief meet maker
But slipped on chrome, an effort-ender
The thief said, “Thank you, Freddy Fender!”
He knew the dog would change his gender
If given half a chance;
Best leave this scrappy dance.

The thief slunk out of sight, and grabbed
A carburetor, slinging
It to a heap away, which clabbed
And rung a tone for zinging
And Hellhound was beguiled away
And our eloosive thief ran très
Vite to the fence and up, to sway
Atop, and yelled “Yoo Hoo,
Au ‘voir, O Doggie-Poo!”

Pasta your prime

One minute on the microwave
Another on your lips
A lifetime in your fat so brave
Engirdling your hips.

The pasta you so willfully
Devoured in your youthfulness
Metabolized so skillfully
And vanished, in all truthfulness,

But as the decades drift on by
We slow, we stroll, we’re no so spry,
And pleasures stir and goodies fry
And sing a glutton’s lullaby

Inveigling in its rhyme,
Your ribs are Pasta Prime.

I never knew that

I never knew that
Nor did I know this
Nor the other thing
But it’s not for lack of trying

And sifting through
A lifetime of Thisses
And all those Thats
And the host of Other Things

For that particular That
This specific This
And the like-no-other Other Thing

That we all wonder
And whisper
And worship
About:

This Unknowable
That Indescribable
Other Thing
On the Other Side.

****

Many thanks to my Big Bro Bob, who is a fine and expressive poet in his own right!