Inspired words of verse? USA from bad to worse?

To the editor:

There is little more prosaic than I. Like the aspiring bourgeois in a French play, I’m ecstatic to find that what I write is prose.

But I was so impressed by the published poet Bob Fisher’s advice that the way to poet laureate was practice, practice, practice that after some warm-up pinkie exercises I labored and brought forth an ode to my bête noire, Jesse Jackson, who among other acts of note speaks in rhymed couplets:

Jesse, I’d certainly hate t’annoy ya’, but talkin’ in rhyme is a sure sign o’ paranoia.

After recovering from this creative effort by dint of due rest and refreshment and spending my days and nights with Addison and Steele, and Ogden Nash, Ira Gershwin (“The city’s clamor can never spoil, the dreams of a boy and goil”) and Scott Joplin, I brushed up my iambic pentameter and, with obeisance to Maurice Ravel’s homage to the great musical family Couperin, his suite for solo piano, “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” I composed this:

Le Tombeau de Soetoro

(Music ripped loosely from “Greensleeves”)



Whose child is this, who claims to be

A native son of my own country?

Whose eyes the first light of day did see

In beautiful Kenya colony,

Under Zanzibar’s nominal sovereignty?

And bionic antibodies were created

When Kenya’s air he inhalated.

All considered he just might be a

Native son of Mombasa,

Under Zanzibar’s nominal sovereignty.

Whose child this is,

Whose son he might be,

We might never know with certainty.

Nor can we be sure that we will endure

The benevolent tyranny of Barry.

But trillions are spent that we might see

The benevolent tyranny of Barry.

This is my first song. Before this, I didn’t write much.

Next, perhaps, I should write an ode to rootless charlatans, entitled “Variations on a Theme of Elmer Gantry.” It would be laced with “Manchurian Candidate” nuance, and drawn from life.