Friday Spontaneous Poem

From: Emery Campbell

Hike Eith,

Interesting. I once entered a similar sort of challenge contest in which one was to write a poem incorporating the following words:

exaggerate, wind, dirt, raisin, game, chicken, garlic, cream, chimney, and soda.

It could be any form but it had to make sense.

If you show me yours I'll show you mine (nudge, nudge, wink, wink...)

ELC

OK. Here it goes, Emery:

The Greatest Form of Flattery

Chimpanzees under attack exaggerate
their screams and the more cinematic ones wind
up channeling Tarzan. These exacerbate
quandaries of the immaterial mind.

‘Who’s imitating whom?’ stirs us to dig dirt
to crush clods in search of the golden raisin.
‘Well enough’ is never left alone. It hurts
to pray when answers are trapped inside resin.

A chimp would never booby trap the chimney,
bait Santa Claus with cookies and spiked soda.
Our vocal cords and thumbs have made us cagey,
plotting murders while prone in a pagoda.

The chimps have moved on to a banana game—
they wring the peels as if choking a chicken.
When bananas go extinct who will they blame?
Moot point when the baby chimps cry and sicken

while onlookers lunch on stir-fry with garlic
sauce and one of us humans orders up cream.
A sip of tea to go with man’s oft cyclic
icing up of ‘nice’ into a cube of ‘mean.’