The blathering idiot and poetry

The blathering idiot knew April was poetry month and he thought he could impress his on again, off again girl friend Zoey with a poem or two. But the month was running out and he had not yet thought of anything poetic to write, though he had taken the time to study some about poetry making.

Additionally, after the restaurant fiasco where he had waited and waited and waited for an employee to come and wash his hands because the sign in the rest room clearly said: Employees must wash hands, and this caused him to leave Zoey’s young daughter Xenia sitting by herself for over 30 minutes, which she then reported to her mother, well, his relationship with Zoey had cooled once again.

So, this was his chance, though a part of him was beginning to wonder why he should care.

He started with something at least a little familiar:

Roses are red and violets are blue
Your eyes are weird and you are, too.

The blathering idiot was proud to have gotten three rhymes in two lines, but the more he looked at the couplet, the more he realized Zoey would not appreciate his poetic efforts at assonance. At least that what he thought it was called. She would probably say he was just being one.

He then tried something that incorporated the month:

The month of poetry is about to end
The rains of April have been real thin.
A new month stands about to begin.
May nouns, verbs & rain come again.

Once upon a poem dreary....

There wasn’t anything about Zoey or love or stuff like that in that poem. He tried several more, and then several more after that. He tried haikus. He tried sonnets. He tried free verse and blank verse and some things to which he was adverse. Finally, in desperation, he tried limericks. First one. Then a second. And finally, he came up with one that wasn’t quite what he had in mind, but it did capture his mood, and might express to Zoey how he felt since she wasn’t talking to him much since the restaurant incident:

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who went on a dinner date and got stuck with it.
Not the bill, I say,
though that, too, came his way,
but the knife in his heart and the luck of it.

He read it and reread it and re-reread it, and then finally decided to put it in an envelope and mail it to her. He wasn’t from Nantucket – wherever that was – but she knew that. And while it didn’t directly mention love, love was there. And while Zoey wasn’t mentioned directly, she was in there, too.

He could only hope it wouldn’t give her too many ideas.