Tom's Poems - The Complete Collection

I'm not a big poetry fan.  But there are times when poetry can express things so simply and succinctly, and beautifully, that it is stunning.  Here are a couple examples, from past posts on this blog:

• Quote of the Day: TS Eliot on Exploration and Knowing, March 10, 2012
• There's a hole in my sidewalk, September 20, 2010

But there is something missing!  I don't think I've shared with you, my seven* readers, my poetry.  So here it is, the complete collection of Tom's poems!  Note that all of these poems share a common structure.  All poems follow a 1-3-3 syllable structure, and all lines rhyme.  Yes, difficult to pull off, but somehow I managed to do this with ALL the poems I've written!

So, without further delay, here they are:

Cat
Cat
Rhymes with splat
And that's that.

Joe
Joe
Rhymes with blow
So let's go!


Yes sir, that's my complete collection!

Okay, so there's a story behind these poems.  No, no cats were harmed in the writing of these poems, by the way.  Not sure if Joe got blown or not...

Both were written in either the summer of 1988 or 1989, the two summers where I worked at Ehrich's Bavarian Inn in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin.  I've talked about working there before, for an amazing woman, in these posts.

• Rita, 54545, USA, June 22, 2010  (One of my very best posts, by the way.  Read it now.)
• Labels, July 13, 2010

We had a dishwasher, named Mary Ellen, working with us.  She was the kind of person you might feel sorry for--until you got to know her.  Maybe around 40 years old, I didn't know much about her or anything close to her full story.  But she had apparently had some money in the past, even owning horses, but had fallen on hard times.  Sounded to me like she really squandered a good chunk of money.

For the first poem, some of us got a little tired of Mary Ellen talking about her cat all the time.  So I ended up writing "Cat" in response.  I wrote it up on the back of a paper placemat and hung it up on the wall in the kitchen.  Mary Ellen went to take it down, but Rita LOVED it!  And so it stayed.

Then later in the summer, Mary Ellen made the grave mistake of mentioning that she was seeing a guy named Joe.  Well, we all started teasing her about that.  And it didn't take me long to come up with "Joe."  Again, it hung on the kitchen wall for the remainder of the summer.

Yes, you never know where inspiration will strike.  You just never know.

I often say, when I come up with a crazy joke that applies to a certain situation, that "the jokes, they write themselves."  These poems are an early example of this, for me.


Oh wait, I forgot one.  Here it is, previously posted on this blog:
Ode to the North Georgia Mountains, from May 9, 2010.

Ode to the North Georgia Mountains

Tar snakes, how they squirm.
Life is too short to be stuck
Behind a Camry. 

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